The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  Petra’s mind was still going wild. Dramatic Petra couldn’t quite believe that this time, the dramatic truth was the real truth. But surely Daniel’s version had to be wrong. She waited yet another moment until her words had come together in her head, and then she said out loud, “Like an Emily Dickinson poem, without a title. Can you just tell me the poem and leave the title out of it? Give me only the context.”

  Geraldine tilted her head to one side, regarding her thoughtfully. “Clever Petra. All right. All right. Daniel, though, you must get off the floor. I can hear you listening, so I might as well be able to see you as well. Come here and hear a story.”

  To Petra’s surprise—everything was to be a surprise today—Daniel joined them. He didn’t sit. Instead he crossed his arms and stood by a screen with two peacocks painted on it. But he was there.

  Geraldine did not stand, but she sat straight, as always, and held her hands out as if inviting them into her mind. She began.

  • • •

  “Once there was a she. She lived in the north of Pahang, a place of spiky rattans with dragon’s blood in their veins and great tualang trees tied with strangling figs and ferns hiding pitcher plants hungry for meat. The forest in Taman Negara was a place of wild secrets, and she was one of them.

  “Back then, she was faster and sleeker.

  “She lived among the ferns, skin like honey, eyes colored like the water of Tasik Chini. Her language was the birds’, the monkeys’, even the wild boars’. If she heard a sound she loved, she learned to make it herself. The finest sounds of all were the ones made by the men who forayed into the jungle to dig roots.

  “She learned to make their sounds, their words, and when she called their words to them, they plunged deep into the forest after her. She did not need to eat many of them to survive. But she was a wild, savage thing, like the rivers after rainy season, and so, like the river, she rushed and killed without purpose.

  “She—and those like her—were legends. Men did not enter the jungle at night.

  “After some generations, another one like her appeared in the trees. He was there to pursue her, but he did not make lovely sounds. So she moved farther away from him, to the edge of the forest. She darted and flickered through villages to eat, and she became a wilder legend than before.

  “That was when she was caught.

  “Not by the men who hunted roots nor the men who gathered fish. White men from a foreign shore, with bright, strange clothing and beautiful, strange words. One of the officers called her Geraldine, and he made her clothing to cover her honey skin. During the day he taught her to dance and speak, and at night he displayed her in a cage while his company drank wine. He fed her prisoners when she grew hungry. Sometimes ladies or their men would draw too close to the cage during the dances and she would be able to reach them through the bars. But she never got to eat them, no matter how surely she caught them. ‘Geraldine,’ the officer whispered, ‘you must learn manners.’

  “In London she learned manners. In Dublin she learned poetry. In South Africa she learned that men died whether or not she killed them. In New York she learned that she, too, would one day die. She was no longer fast and sleek, and now she had manners. Now she had learned all of the beautiful words that she wanted to learn, and she tired of hunting men and ruining her clothing. She tired of ugly things entirely. She wished only to have and to touch and to hear things that were lovely; she wished only to be a lovely thing herself. She had put away childish things and become a lady.”

  Geraldine put her hands in her lap. “That is my story, Petra, without a title.”

  Petra closed her mouth, which had fallen open in an unseemly way. She had no words, but Geraldine didn’t expect her to.

  Instead, Geraldine looked to Daniel. “Now, Daniel,” she said, “perhaps you’ll tell us your story.”

  “Once upon a time, there was a monster,” Daniel said. “The end.”

  He walked away.

  • • •

  Petra called Marla. And Edith. And Frances. The three sisters stood on the biting sidewalk outside of the building, turned toward each other, three different brands of fancy. Edith was the fanciest of them all. She looked like a young Victorian queen, with her hair done like Geraldine’s.

  “You didn’t tell me Geraldine was a cannibal,” Petra said.

  “Technically,” Frances’s words fluttered from one branch to a higher one, “she’s not a cannibal, as humans aren’t the same species as her.”

  Petra continued, “And you hired me and sent me up there all alone all this time!”

  Edith pursed her lips. “We did make sure you weren’t there after dark. You remember we took great pains.”

  “But what if she got very hungry? Like now!”

  Marla patted Petra’s shoulder gingerly. “Oh, you were always perfectly safe. Geraldine has very particular tastes. You’ve seen her apartment. She only wants to eat a certain sort of person. And you, well, you’re so plain, Petra. We knew right away you would be an excellent companion.”

  “The risk was nonexistent,” Edith said. “After all, you saw how fancy Daniel was, and she won’t touch him, stubborn thing.”

  “She just doesn’t want him because we picked him out,” Marla agreed. “She wants to be able to pick something out herself, which is impossible. And so even though she would have liked Daniel fine if she had seen him on her own, she just won’t take him out of principle because I found him.”

  “Now we play this ridiculous waiting game!” Edith said.

  Petra’s mouth opened, but then she remembered to think her entire sentence through before saying it out loud. “You three are afraid. That’s why you won’t ever go up. You think she wants to eat you.”

  Frances’s laugh nervously hopped to another branch. “Well, look at us.”

  “She ate her piano tutor,” Marla said with annoyance. “I think because she had ringlets.”

  Petra pressed her fingers to her eyes and then lowered them. “Why did you keep her?”

  Edith sounded impatient. “Surely you see that she’d never survive now if she was turned free. You ask us to kill her?”

  “She kills people!” Petra said.

  Frances’s hands flew into the air. “Shh! Shhh!” There was no one on the street to hear, though.

  “Killed people,” Edith corrected. “And not very many, if you compare her to, say, malaria.”

  Petra allowed her face to say what her mouth couldn’t.

  “She’s been in the family for ages,” Marla said, clearly upset that Petra remained baffled. “What were we supposed to do? We knew she’d outlive Mother and Father. And Edith always says it’s about preserving the species, but it’s not that. We don’t want her to die.”

  But she eats people, Petra wanted to say, but didn’t. She didn’t need to say it out loud again. Also, it was Geraldine. Petra didn’t want her to die either.

  “We love her,” Frances whispered. “We grew up with her.”

  “It’s really a pity we grew into things she would eat,” Edith noted.

  “Please don’t stop visiting her,” Marla added. “She does so enjoy it.”

  What an impossible thing.

  Petra pulled off her gloves in order to be able to open the door to the building. Crisply, she replied, “I’m headed up now, in fact. I don’t suppose you’ll be joining me?”

  The three sisters peered at her and blinked. They were not.

  “Please convince her to eat Daniel,” Edith said. “It’s getting expensive to send him takeout.”

  • • •

  Petra climbed the stairs, knocked, was allowed in. Daniel was not sitting by the wall. She felt a burst of conflicting emotions: Geraldine had eaten him, she would get better. And Geraldine had eaten him: there was a horrific stain in here somewhere.

  Petra didn’t ask Geraldine—there were no Geraldine words to ask her if she had eaten him.

  “I’m still alive.”

  Daniel’s voice came
from somewhere over one of the screens as Geraldine edged back to a chaise. As Geraldine eased herself down, Daniel appeared from behind a banana tree with a stack of books in his hands.

  “I thought you’d been eaten,” she said.

  “I knew you would. I’m just bored senseless of sitting there and I don’t even … don’t come close,” he warned, as she drew near to both Geraldine and him. “I smell. I used her big claw-foot tub, but I had to put on all the same clothing again afterward.” He laughed, but it was a miserable sort of laugh. “I never thought I’d be here long enough for it to matter. I didn’t pack.”

  Both of them looked at Geraldine, who lifted her chin in a vaguely rebellious fashion.

  “We should talk about solutions,” Petra said. “I just spoke to Edith and Marla and Frances. If you don’t want to eat Daniel, can I help in some other way?”

  Geraldine said coolly, “Don’t help me. I know why I’m making my choices, and I am fine with them. Daniel is the one you should be counseling; being eaten is a poor answer to life’s problems.”

  “I thought I was being civic minded,” Daniel shot back. “I should have just used pills.”

  Petra lowered her backpack to the sofa beside Geraldine. She didn’t feel like reading any more than Geraldine seemed to feel like being talked to about food. “How did you come to be here?”

  “How did you?” Daniel snapped. “Did they come find you on a poetry reader’s forum and fetch you back for her? Did they put out a classified ad ‘looking for pretentious girls with pretty clothes to entertain centuries-old killing machine?’ ”

  Petra didn’t move. “That was singularly unkind.”

  He rested his forehead on the shelf. “I know. I’m an asshole. I can’t stop. I want to stop. I want it all—”

  “You can just say sorry,” Geraldine broke in. “And answer her question in a civil way. That would be an excellent start.”

  Recall how in the introduction I reasoned that Geraldine and Petra must have complementary character arcs. Daniel is the third wheel on this people-eating plot-wagon, and his story has to fit in, as well. Ideally, his story needs to make theirs more meaningful, and vice versa. So Geraldine has made herself into the elegant creature she wanted to be, Petra is learning that elegance is something that can be made, and Daniel has made himself into something he thought was elegant and really is just empty. Can they all learn from each other?

  Daniel’s expression was petulant for a long moment before clearing. “I don’t have a good story of how I came to be here. I didn’t start in a Malaysian jungle or whatever. I just live in New Jersey and sell advertising space to companies that sell shit, and I dress like this so that I can forget that I go home to a shitty apartment with gray carpet and no furniture in it. There is no sad part where I tell you that something bad happened so I wanted to get eaten. I just looked down and saw that my life wasn’t really what I had pictured when I was a teenager. Edith found me on a suicide forum and said I had good taste in shoes. The end.”

  “I’m not who I was a few months ago,” Petra said. “When I first came here, I wouldn’t have been able to talk to you without going red. I was miserable. I hated everything about me except for poetry. You can change. If there’s one thing about yourself that you like, you can keep that and the rest can change in no time at all.”

  Daniel looked at her. His expression was ugly. “You think that because you’re not even a person yet. You’re what, seventeen? You don’t have any idea how you can make one sort-of bad decision, and then another one, and then another one, and then it’s just so many of them piled up on each other that there isn’t any way out of it. You haven’t had time to become something stupid and incurable.”

  There was silence. Petra was thinking that he really was a jerk, but didn’t want to say it out loud because it felt both counterproductive and like she would be agreeing with him, which was the last thing she wanted to do.

  Geraldine finally said, “Well, I’m afraid to say that I’m not going to be eating you, Daniel. Petra, I’d very much like to listen to some poetry now.”

  Petra said, “I’d like to solve your problem, though, Geraldine! This is terrible! Can’t I get you … a different kind of food, or something?”

  Geraldine reached over to pat Petra’s hand. “Petra, please. There’s only one thing I can imagine I’d like to eat, and it’s quite impossible. Please, let’s not talk about it anymore. Please respect my decisions. My mind is not feeble.”

  Daniel made an incredulous noise. “I might as well go!”

  He didn’t go, though. He just stood there with the books in his hands.

  Petra opened her mouth and then closed it. She very much wanted to talk about it some more, but instead she turned to Daniel. “I might only be seventeen, but you know who’s older than you and figured some things out about changing herself, Daniel?” Then she turned to Geraldine. “All right, let’s read.”

  What she wanted to say to Daniel was she’ll change you, too, if you want to be changed.

  But surely he could just tell that by looking at her. If he really wanted to see it, everything that Petra had learned about herself was visible from the outside.

  • • •

  Petra had to miss several days of visits because of the holidays, and when she next came to Geraldine’s, Daniel opened the door at her knock. Geraldine was bedridden, he explained, and Mr. Goodminster had suggested she stay in bed to preserve her strength.

  Petra hovered by the front door, coat still on, disbelieving that Geraldine was somewhere within the apartment, lying down. “And you’re still here!”

  Daniel said, “Two beasts in one apartment, right?”

  She frowned at him. “You look different.”

  “She cut my hair,” he said.

  “Geraldine!?”

  Daniel looked at the floor. “I brought her tea—”

  “You did what!”

  “I was bored,” he said, his manner too deliberately careless to be anything near careless. “And after that, she told me how to wash my clothing in the sink and then she came into the room and she said she would cut my hair like she used to cut the officer’s hair.”

  Petra struggled to imagine this scene.

  “Wait,” she whispered, finally. “You were naked?”

  Daniel’s ears went as pink as Petra’s used to. “It wasn’t like that!”

  No, Petra expected that it wasn’t. But—still.

  “I read her some poetry,” Daniel said, even more carelessly than before, and Petra’s shock turned into slow pleasure. “And she told me I could stay here in this jungle of hers until I was ready to go back out into the world again.”

  Petra thought of the stairs behind her, stretching down and out into New York, a world that neither Daniel nor Geraldine seemed at all prepared to inhabit. Only a few months before, she would have thought either of them far more qualified to live in that city. And now, instead, Petra was the only one who seemed likely to wander those streets anytime soon.

  “But what will she eat?” Petra asked in a hushed voice. “I don’t mean that I want her to eat you. But she has to eat.”

  Geraldine’s voice rang out from the other side of the room; she had heard them, impossibly, this entire time. “Petra, please stop going on about that and come read to me!”

  • • •

  At home, Petra filled out college applications, all of them for New York schools. Her mother said, “Petra, this letter of recommendation from your English teacher is ridiculous. She says you’re personally much improved! What was wrong with you? Oh, I suppose she means your mumbling.”

  “Possibly,” Petra replied.

  “I’m glad to see all these local schools,” her mother added. “Staying close to home.”

  “Yes,” Petra agreed, and picked up her bag.

  “Where are you off to now?”

  Home, thought Petra.

  • • •

  It was the end of January when she climbed the
stairs for the last time. She removed her coat as soon as she stepped into the stairwell, hung it over her arm, and jogged up the six flights. At the top, she smoothed her hair and knocked on Geraldine’s door.

  Daniel opened it at once.

  “Petra,” he said, “I didn’t know how to call you. It’s bad.”

  He shut the door behind her.

  Inside, the apartment had subtly shifted since that week Geraldine had first told her story. The plants were lusher and greener than ever before, as Daniel had taken over their care. He had moved aside some of the screens and view blocks to allow Geraldine’s bed area to have a better view of the rest of the room. The result was a space that was lighter, smaller, more comforting and less mysterious. Less Geraldine, too. More Daniel.

  He led Petra back to Geraldine’s bedchamber. It was against an interior wall, so most of it was dark brick hung with wall planters. Ferns draped down behind her, some curling on the mattress itself. The light came through the windows in the opposite wall, checkered through banana leaves and palms. The bed itself was high and ornate, with old brass knobs.

  Geraldine was curled small at the head of it, withered in a way that her plants were not. She was terrifyingly still.

  As Daniel hovered by the screens, Petra skidded to the bedside and knelt beside it, clutching at Geraldine’s hand. It wasn’t warm, but it wasn’t cold: she was still alive. But Daniel was right: her eyes were open only a crack, and her breaths were far apart.

  “Geraldine,” Petra said. “What can I do?”

  Geraldine cracked her eyes open a little wider. “Keep being you.”

  “I should have found you something …”

  “I always wanted to pick for myself,” Geraldine said. Her gaze wandered around the room at all her fiddly, particular, beautiful things. Here, at least, was still very much like her and very little like Daniel. “I never would have eaten Daniel. I wanted someone …”

  She trailed off, but Petra knew what she meant. Someone like Geraldine’s other things.

  “It’s too late now, anyway,” Geraldine said. “But it’s all right.”