*
When Dori told Erin’s boyfriend what had really happened, he asked her this: Are you crazy or something?
What could Dori say that she hadn’t said already?
Dori didn’t think she was crazy. She didn’t even think the blankfaced man was crazy with his skiff and robe and bag of coins. She hadn’t even known what was in the bag until the third or fourth or fifth time that Erin had dragged her into the weeds, their sickly green and skinny-sharp razor bodies cutting her shins as they skulked along the river’s edge.
Nothing had really happened before that. Erin would stand there and just wait, while Dori got bored and started to imagine decaying fingers of people who’d been murdered or the slimy sharp mouths of crocodiles in the river. The last time they went together, she’d just about convinced herself that an enormous croc was about the jump out of the water and eat her when she felt Erin press against her.
—Be quiet. Erin had breathed, her words clammy against Dori’s neck. Watch.
Dori watched and for a long time she didn’t see anything. It was the middle of the morning but somehow clouds came or maybe the sun went down and suddenly it was twilight and the torn lip of a low skiff appeared out of the reeds and the water. In the skiff was a figure who Dori thought was a jedi maybe but the robes hid everything until he turned toward them and there was nothing in his face that she could see (so not a jedi, not a real one like Obi Wan Kenobi). No eyes or mouth or anything human. Nevertheless, the robed figure (who over time, minutes, hours, became a man, a man with features and hands but still had nothing in his face, a blank screen) looked at them and held out his hand and Erin leaned over the water, her body suddenly skinny and sharp like the razor weeds and would have gone to him then but Dori held her arm tight tight in her small brown fists with their sharp sharp nails.
—You’re hurting me, Erin said.
Dori felt Erin’s skin break away from her own and she knew she couldn’t stop Erin. Not now. Maybe not ever. Erin waded through the murk until she was up to her thighs in the river. The water made it look like Erin was bleeding but that was only because her skirt was red. Now it was red and wet. The blank-faced man grasped Erin’s chin very lightly, like he was holding a ripe plum and was worried he’d bruise its sensitive skin.
Dori wanted to scream but couldn’t: when she saw the blank-faced man (he was so grey, his robes covered everything about him) she thought she might never breathe again.
Erin opened her mouth and held out her tongue. There was a gold coin on it, the twilight caught it like it was an early star, and suddenly her mouth was full of light. Dori wondered if Erin had swallowed the sky.
—You shall pass. The blank-faced man said, or maybe only thought. It was hard to say. His mouth wasn’t moving at all, but Dori definitely heard, or maybe just knew he said it. Maybe it was a trick, like ventriloquism. The blank-faced man plucked the coin from Erin’s mouth and placed it in his bag.
All the light in the world flicked off.
*
I’m going to show you a trick, Erin said.
Erin’s clothes clashed brilliantly with the orange and plaid couch. She was wearing one of their mother’s Stevie Nicks skirts and a sparkly scarf, all broomstick witchy. A bruja, her father would have said, if he’d still been alive. It had been such a long time since anyone had seen him; Dori just assumed he was dead at that point. She couldn’t even remember what he had looked like or even what he wore. She couldn’t have remembered him back, even if she had wanted to. Which she never did.
—I’m wearing an orange and plaid couch suit, Erin commanded. Even my face and neck are covered in itchy fabric.
Dori tried not to giggle, even though her stomach felt giddy. She didn’t want to break the spell that Erin wanted her to believe in.
Close your eyes and count to 11, Erin whispered, making her voice fade slowly like a warm breeze snaking through the tops of trees. When you open your eyes I’ll be gone. Eventually you’ll forget me completely; it will be like I never existed.
Dori completely believed this was possible because she loved Erin and knew that magic worked and if you stopped seeing, whatever you didn’t see would just disappear. She knew this, too, because she would lay in her bed at night and make herself stop seeing the blankfaced man, his hands, his bag of coins. She stopped seeing the flash of metal on Erin’s tongue, Erin’s fingers in his palm, the sparkle of money dropping into his fist.
But Dori didn’t get to 11 because her mother came in screaming about how her car was missing again and if Dori knew anything about it and wasn’t telling she’d beat her with her espadrille shoe. She sounded ridiculous but Dori tried not to laugh. She even kept her eyes closed so she wouldn’t have to break the spell, wouldn’t have to see her mother crazy angry. And when she opened her eyes, Erin was gone.
*
They found the car two weeks later at the edge of the river. Erin had been hiding since the morning with the couch. Dori knew she was still around because at night Erin would sit on the end of her bed and tell her stories about the places she hid and the secret things people did all day when they thought no one was watching. Dori would turn her face to the opposite wall and look out of the corner of her eye toward the window and see Erin reflected there: a wisp of blond, a sparkle, a sneer. Dori stopped being able to see Erin, though, once her boyfriend pressed his face up against the window looking for her. After that she could only hear Erin, though she had to listen very hard. After a while, Dori kept falling asleep during their visits and in the morning could not always remember what was said. Eventually, Erin stopped coming because Dori stopped remembering to look for her. At first, Dori thought that maybe Erin had found their father and would never come back. She hated Erin for that, and sometimes even tried to forget she had even existed. Their mother didn’t even care that Erin was gone, though she’d stopped yelling at Dori for mumbling to herself, one of their mother’s pet peeves, which was something.
*
—One more time. The cop said. What did the man in the boat do to you?
Dori had already told them everything.
—Not to me, she said. To my sister.
—Your sister.
The cop looked at her mother, who was frowning at the floor and massaging the bridge of her nose.
—Yes. She got all wet walking through the river to the boat. She gave the man her coin. I didn’t want her to go. But he grabbed her face and then she started glowing and then …
—Goddamnit, her mother interrupted. What the hell happened to my car?
—Erin—Dori started to explain, how she’d made her come with her, how the car would be faster, how with it they’d be back before their mother even woke up, how they’d cross the bridge and back and go wherever they wanted and maybe even never come back, they’d be escape artists, disappearers.
Dori’s mother stood up and reached over the desk, grabbed Dori’s chin hard. Not like the blank-faced man had. Not like she was a ripe fruit, a sensitive plum.
—I don’t want to hear that name ever again. Her mother whispered.
Dori was so frightened that she agreed. She never mentioned Erin to her mother again. She tried not to even think about her.
*
Dori feels bad about that now. She thinks that Erin would have come back for good if only Dori had remembered to think about her more, to talk to her more, even if she couldn’t quite see the wisps of her hair reflected in the window. It was just that it was hard. After the thing with Erin and the car, her mom had been down on her for being just five degrees off a lot and she wasn’t even allowed to climb trees or walk to the Grand Union by herself. Not that it stopped her. Dori became a trickster after Erin left, stealing rides with strangers and drinking behind the school with older boys. She even tried to bleach her hair so it would look like Erin’s, but because it was so dark naturally, it just came out orange. Eventually, she figured out how to make it perfectly white, bleached out and spiked like the punkers on TV, like the bi
rd and fish and other animal bones down at the river’s edge. She still did all the things she had always done—drank pickle juice and spent spare moments in the tops of trees reading her stolen books—but now she did all the things that Erin had done, or had always wanted to do.
Dori stopped waiting for Erin’s boyfriend to show up at their bedroom window and started waiting for him at work. Erin’s boyfriend’s hands were like long, thin cuts of roast beef, cracked from running the slicer and light pink where his callouses split in the winter. They were warm and soft like good meat, too. Dori would press her cheek against the cool metal of the walk-in freezer at the Grand Union and when she felt the cold of the wall and the hot of his body at the same time, she imagined kisses light like the touch of a flower beneath her chin.
*
It took Dori a long time to remember Erin’s forgetting spell (count to 11 and close your eyes) and an even longer time to remember, to know that she could conjure things, that she could make tv shows just happen from blank snowy screens and maybe other things by thinking about them, by crossing the bridges in her memory, back to where things started, where instead of being just one girl alone inside and out, there were two, : the girl she really was, and the girl, her sister, that she loved.
*
The second time Dori conjured Taxi, she was walking in Times Square, back when it was dirty all the time, with some guy who wasn’t her boyfriend at all but was pretending to be and she was trying very hard to make him go away but she needed money so she decided to bring him back to Queens (where she’d been living with a bunch of other girls and guys who brought their dates home a lot, who all seemed to wear the same clothes and push the same grunts and gasps from their throats instead of talking). At that moment, Dori missed Erin so fiercely, so completely that the TVs that lined the shop window she was leaning on, trying to ignore her not-boyfriend, flickered on and there it was: Taxi. She stared and stared and still couldn’t believe it. It stayed on for hours and Dori just stood there, watching and she even thought that maybe the girl that was standing behind her in the window, almost right where she stood with the bleach-blond hair and the sneer and crucifix dangling for fashion only was really Erin. Erin who before she had disappeared made life better, made life magic, made spells and wove stories that made all of the bad, scary things ok. —Erin, she whispered, ErinErinErin.
But perhaps her voice was too soft, her mind too awake for conjuring. Perhaps her magic wasn’t powerful enough. She’d practiced as often as she could since the night when she’d pressed her cheek to the heat of the metal television box and chanted taxitaxitaxitaxi until she almost huffed herself out. Almost every time, the show would come on and so Dori hoped that she could make Erin really be there, could remember her back. She decided that she was going to just stand here until she could actually feel Erin’s skin beside her again and then she would turn around and they would go home to her apartment in Queens together.
She must have fallen asleep waiting for Erin to materialize completely because the cop and the store manager were yelling way too loud:
—Miss? Miss? You gotta move. You can’t just stand here all night. I gotta a store to run.
Dori didn’t want to open her eyes or turn around or leave because she knew that by falling asleep she had broken the spell.
—What channel are they on? What channel? Dori’s voice sounded strange to her, blond and sneering and it didn’t belong to her anymore. It was like she was someone else now. Someone she was just remembering.
—TVs been off for hours, the store manager said. Off since the Late Late Show.
His voice was full of water, of rivers, bridges; it was drowning and she couldn’t grab hold.
—What channel? What channel? Dori could feel the cop and manager look at each other even though she didn’t have her eyes open, not yet. She had to remember first. To really remember all of it. Everything that happened that September summer. The river, the river.
—Seven. It was channel seven.
When Dori got home, she dragged the old black and white portable into her room to try again while her roommates were sleeping but no matter what she did, channel seven was only static, black and white water pushing violently against the glass of the screen, like it hadn’t been on ever, like it couldn’t remember that it was a station that was supposed to play.
*
The TV she has now is color, which she hopes won’t interfere with her spell. Since she moved in with Strummer, close to the edge of the river, she’s successfully reappeared many things: the friend’s cat Dori lost while she was stoned, her mother’s beat-up Dodge Dart that she either left in Tucson or was stolen, and now, maybe hopefully Erin. She knows that now the smaller things are accomplished (since leaving New York for good, she has spent so much time training her mind, making small things happen), Erin will be a piece of cake.
To prepare she digs out her and Erin’s old cassettes, the flashlight (which only worked that one September summer, the summer Erin disappeared), and a pile of batteries. She turns on the tape deck (it was a Walkman, yes, she knows, but she thinks inaccuracy can be forgiven here, because the sounds and pictures need space to move, roam, gel together into an Erin form in her living room). She turns on the TV (MTV isn’t MTV anymore, no, no all-the-time videos or remote control game shows, but it’s still the same channel, yes still the same number on the big black box). She spreads the cigarettes and brandy-iced coffee and a smooth piece of the orange and plaid couch, moldering with her in this basement by the water’s edge, where nothing moved or really lived in so so long.
But she can’t think about that yet. She’s got to make Erin real again, and all the things that Dori has done and become can disappear, float away in the static snow of the TV screen.
CAMILLA GRUDOVA
The Mouse Queen
Our apartment always looked like Christmas because the shelves were laden with red and green Loeb books in Greek and Latin. Peter’s uncle gave him one every year for his birthday, and we had bought more from second hand shops. Whenever we had guests over, Peter had to point out that he had covered the English translation side of the Latin books with sheets of coloured paper. He and I met in Latin class at university. I was drawn to Latin because it didn’t belong to anybody, there were no native speakers to laugh at me. There were private school kids in my classes who had studied Latin before, but I quickly overtook them. Peter, who was one of them, slicked his hair back like a young Samuel Beckett and had the wet, squinting look of an otter.
He looked down on Philosophy and Classics students who planned to go into law. Under his influence, so did I. Peter wore the same type of clothes every day: heavy striped shirts from an army surplus store, sweaters that hadn’t been dried properly after washing, khakis, Doc Martens and a very old-fashioned cologne whose scent vaguely resembled chutney. He had bought the cologne at a yard sale, only about a teaspoon had been used by the previous owner. It wasn’t until we had dated for some time that I learned his parents were lawyers, that he had grown up with much more money than I had.
Peter and I were married in a church with a replica of Michelangelo’s Pietà. We only invited one friend, an English major who loved Evelyn Waugh, as we thought he was the only person we knew who would understand we wanted to be married in such a manner. Of course our parents wouldn’t want us to be married so young—before we had jobs—so we didn’t tell them at all. We didn’t move in together until our last semester of university, into an apartment above an abandoned grocery store. The landlord had stopped running it years before and left it as it was, with a faded ‘Happy Canada Day’ poster and popsicle advertisements on the dusty glass windows. It was cheap for a one-bedroom, because not many people wanted to live above an abandoned but unemptied grocery store—the threat of vermin seemed too much, and the landlord just couldn’t bring himself to clean it and do something with the space. It seemed he thought he might open it again some time in the future, to sell the mouldy chocolate bars and hardened
gum that remained there.
There was a hatch in our floor that led to a back room in the shop downstairs, and into the shop itself. Down there, Peter found some old cigarettes which seemed safe in comparison to all the old food, and newspapers that dated from when we were five years old. In our living room we had a parlour organ that had belonged to his grandfather. Peter loved the organ—it was a much, much older instrument than the piano. Organs were invented in the Hellenistic period. They were powered using water. In Ancient Rome, Nero played such an organ.
On the organ’s mantel, Peter put a plaster model of a temple which fits in the palm of one’s hand, a statue of Minerva bought at an Italian shop, a collection of postcards of nude athletes Peter got from the British Museum, and a large framed copy of Botticelli’s portrait of St Augustine. Sometimes I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of Peter playing the organ, wearing nothing but his bathrobe, his hair in his face.
We turned a little chair too rickety to sit on into an altar. We made a collage of saints and Roman gods, a mixture of pictures and statues, and oddly shaped candles we had picked up here and there—bee-
hives, trees, cones, owls, angels. Sometimes Peter left offerings, grapes, little cups full of wine and, to my dismay, raw chicken breasts and other bits of meat he bought at a butcher’s. A friend told us it was dangerous to worship such a large, mixed crowd.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 31
