—My answer is no.
—Thank you. Now, you said Aslaug was watching the building burn, not saying anything to anyone. Did it ever occur to you she may have been in shock?
—No.
—When she, in your words, “started going ballistic,” did it ever occur to you she was overwhelmed by what was happening?
—She was pissed—excuse my French. That’s different from being overwhelmed.
—That’s your opinion, isn’t it, Detective? You don’t really know what Aslaug was feeling, do you?
—I know what I saw.
—But you don’t know what Aslaug was feeling, do you?
—I agree I can’t get inside the mind of that woman.
—A simple yes or no would be fine, Detective.
—My answer is no, I don’t know what she was feeling.
—Thank you. Now, when you took her to the police station, you didn’t tell her why the doctor was examining her, did you?
—I don’t know what she was told.
—You didn’t tell her why, isn’t that right?
—I didn’t tell her.
—And when you had the technician draw her blood, you didn’t explain to her what was happening, did you? You just had the person head in there with the needle, isn’t that right?
—I had a search warrant. I didn’t need to get her permission.
—So your answer is that you didn’t explain to her that the technician was going to draw her blood, right?
—Like I said, I don’t know what she was told.
—But you didn’t explain to her what was happening, did you?
—No.
—Detective, when you learned Aslaug tested positive for atropine and scopolamine, did it occur to you that maybe she was acting strangely because she’d been drugged?
—No.
—Why not?
—Some junior officers had just informed me about her prior arrest, about that situation with her mom—
—Objection, Your Honor. Move to strike. Nonresponsive.
—Objection sustained.
—Detective, just so it’s clear, you have absolutely no evidence linking Aslaug to the death of those two women or to the fire, other than the fact that she was at the scene, isn’t that right?
—Given the circumstances, I’d say that may be enough.
—Objection. Move to strike. Speculation.
—Sustained.
—Please just answer the question with a yes or a no.
—No.
—Thank you, Detective. I have no further questions.
ASK AND EMBLA
2003
His lips and breath and tongue flood my neck, then trickle along the line of my jaw to the base of my ear, then in my ear, first swirling and then deep. Then deep and still. He is smelling me. I can hear the faint pull of his nostrils, my cleansed skin, my moist hair. Then he crushes my hair to his face, to his nose, to his mouth, and the pull of his breath is no longer faint. It is gulping my scent, holding it deep within, releasing it slowly, methodically, with reluctance. Then gulping again. And again and again and again. Then it doesn’t release, and his mouth finds mine, and my scent becomes his breath in my mouth. And I forget who I am, what I am, and I don’t care. The universe becomes his lips, his tongue, his teeth, and the weight of his body, and the tension in his body, and his scent.
He slips free the sheet that lies under him, over me, that presses into him, into me. His breath bursts into my mouth with each tug. And with each tug his body becomes more than weight. It becomes skin and coarse hair and the undulating rigidity of muscle.
I remember myself only when his thighs press into mine, his torso pulls back from mine, and he collects me into his eyes. My face, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, the plane of my stomach, my hairstreak. Then his fingers—the tips of his fingers—traverse the course of his eyes, gently, so gently, the sensation of funneled breeze. And I see I am beautiful and desirable and desired.
I try to reach for him, to bring him back to me, to give to him what he is giving to me, but I cannot move. Not my arms, my legs. So he falls to me, as if he understands.
Say yes, he says. Say yes.
And I do. Over and over. But he doesn’t move, as if he’s savoring my words. I again strain to move, but my limbs remain spread above and below like the wings of an angel of God. I call to him. Rune. Rune.
Aslaug. The name is muffled to my neck. Sweet Aslaug, dear Aslaug.
Then the pressure of him fills me, and I cry out, for I’ve never known—never imagined—this unity of bliss and pain. Then less pain, less pain. Then bliss. Only bliss. The tingling, quivering rhythm of bliss.
My sheets are cold and damp, below me and above me. And my skin and hair are wet. I’ve just woken, and for a moment, as I begin to climb from the sheets, my mind thinks of nothing but the moist chill of my body wrapped in the moist chill of the sheets. But then the dream slams into my brain. And I fall back to the sheets, back to the clinging discomfort of them, struck by the power of my mind.
I try to hold on to the dream—remember it. But I sense it slipping from me as if in mud; it seems little but an indentation of it will last.
The room is still dark. I explore the nightstand like braille for the paper and pen I know can hold the dream in a way I can’t. But my arms, my hands and fingers, feel leaden. I flick the light switch, and the brightness blinds me more. I close my eyes: I feel I’m floating; I feel like laughing. I open my eyes again and now I see, but I see no paper, no pen.
I pull myself up—my body feels leaden, too—and I look down to the floor; I nearly plummet to the floor. The paper and pen lie there: the paper somewhat crumpled, the pen marring the stone. I collect them and lie back propped. I write; I try to record every memory. But how can I record what I experienced? The sensations of the dream seem otherworldly.
When I finish, I read the words I’ve written: the dream has all but faded, and my words seem to have been written by another. I read the piece twice, and then again, and each time I feel more confused. Is it normal to have such dreams? I know so little about sex. Mostly what I know I’ve derived from books. I understand biology, not passion.
Then I remember The Scarlet Letter. Maybe I was dreaming of Hester, and Dimmesdale. Not me. Not Rune.
I fold the paper until it’s the size of a walnut and climb from the bed. I trip over nothing. Get up. I trip again before I find the old coat Sanne gave me; I zip the dream into the inner pocket. I know I must hide it from the preacher and Sanne. I know I must keep the dream from Rune.
In Norse mythology, the god Odin formed the first two humans from logs: the man from the log of an ash tree, the woman from the log of an elm. The man was called Ask, or “ash,” and the woman Embla, or “elm.” They lived in Midgard, in the middle of the great ash tree. Before this dream, I thought the Norse story was a beautiful one. I imagined the crevices of the dark bark stretching and curving, and forming; I imagined the woman emerging, her skin and hair the color of the elm. And the man, as the ash tree gave way, molding himself into limbs and shoulders and a torso, and a head and hair of ash. But now, the beauty of the story has faded some. The emerging woman seems lonely, to me, hollow; the man no longer seems strong and sturdy—having been born from the great ash—but fragile.
Something has shattered. I’m dressing and fumbling when I hear it. It slams, bursts, scatters. And then another slam, another burst, another scatter. The sound came from near, from one of the other bedrooms, I think. I lean against the bedroom door, peer out the window in the door, into the hall, down the hall.
At first I see only the hall’s cold-stone floor, its cold-stone walls. And the closed doors that line it. But then I see the color of blood escape from the preacher’s room, from under her door; it paints the pale crevices between the stones.
My hand is on the door’s lever, but my breath is caught somewhere inside me. And I’m caught: I don’t throw open the door; I don’t burst into the hall; I don’t lau
nch into the preacher’s bedroom to save her. I don’t want to find my mother in the form of the preacher, but I do find her. I have found her, in my mind: I envision Mother on the hardwood floor in Hartswell, still folded into her package, still brittle beneath the hovering. But Mother has the preacher’s face.
Or does the preacher have Mother’s face? She’s in the hall, suddenly, the preacher. But her face bulges red, like Mother in pain; and her eyes show red, like Mother’s eyes steeped in madapple. But she’s not bleeding, I think. She’s not dead.
I watch the preacher lurch, halt, stagger, descend. And now I do throw open the door, I do burst into the hall, I do run to save her. But I slip, and I tumble onto her heap: she’s warm, and her breasts rise and fall, and the trickling red has reached her; she wears the same clothes she wore the evening before, but they are creased with deep paths, and the red climbs one path.
“Sara?” I say, and I lift myself from her, sit on the stone beside her.
Her mouth falls open. She snores. The stench of sweet schnapps puffs with her breath. I realize the red on the floor is not blood: it’s schnapps.
I remember seeing Mother inebriated, reeking with a new batch of elderberry wine, or schnapps. Her dry-ocean eyes would shine wet, and her pale skin would shine bright. And her rounded vowels would further round, her consonants would soften and blur. But Mother was still Mother: lording over, not lorded over.
I stand, leave the preacher on the floor and follow the trail of schnapps. The preacher’s room is dark, but I see the broken bottles, the splinters of glass, the pool of schnapps. I see the unbroken bottles arranged about the room like pebbles tossed.
And I see Rune. He sits on the edge of the bed; he stares into the pool; his hands dance in a circle around one another.
“Rune?” I say, and he looks up, but without recognition, it seems.
Then suddenly there is recognition, and he springs from the bed into the schnapps pool. “She doesn’t do this anymore. She did this because of me. Don’t tell anyone, Aslaug. She’ll lose her church….” He also wears clothes from the day before, and his hair is a mess of coils and spikes.
“I’m not telling anyone…,” I say, but I don’t understand. And I can’t help but think of the dream of Rune, of how real it seemed, how real he seemed. Of how I wish he could hold me now.
And I can’t help but think that I’d like to sit down. That I need to sit down. “She’s out here, Rune,” I say. “She fell.”
“She fell?” He pushes past me, and the schnapps smears past me, and I catch myself on the frame of the door.
I watch as he cradles her head, as he dabs the drool with his sleeve. “I’m sorry, Mor,” he says. “I’m so sorry.” He lifts her chin, attempts to close her mouth, but it hangs again. His fingers explore the rays etched around her eyes and the wrinkles that slice the skin between her nose and lips. “She didn’t sleep at all,” he says. He’s talking to me now—he must be. But he looks at the preacher’s wide mouth and breathes the preacher’s stale schnapps. “I heard her this morning….” Then he does look at me. “My God,” he says. “Oh my God.”
“What?” I say. “What is it?” And I feel my backside slide, see the crook of my knees, feel the cold stone on my rear.
He looks at the doorway where I stood, not where I landed, not where I sit. And I realize there is a world here I’m not part of, where the laws are different, the meaning of words is different. And people are not what they seem.
The preacher opens her eyes, arranges her hands over her eyes.
“Come to bed, Mor,” Rune says when he sees her stir. He lifts her like a root: his hands encase her torso, and he pulls her up, and straight. They walk together back through the schnapps tracks. Rune closes the door against me. And I’m left to the universe I think I know: where blood is blood and dreams are dreams.
And schnapps is schnapps. I sit here looking at the schnapps, knowing I should wipe up what I can. But I feel I can’t stand. I’m sick, I think. Of course, I’m sick. How odd that Rune would pretend I’m sick and then I’d become sick. I feel like laughing. Again. But then I feel I’m going to get sick, and I do, onto the stone, into the schnapps. And I feel better. Better enough to gather rags, water. I mop what I can, wipe what I can, wash away what I can, but the stream of schnapps leads to the ocean of schnapps, and the ocean is beyond my reach, beyond the door. As are the glass shards that speckle the ocean, that speckle the room. As is Rune.
As was Rune.
He opens the door, sees me. “You were listening?” he says.
“No.” I show him the rags, the pail. “I was cleaning up from the bottles. The broken bottles.”
“The broken bottles are in Mor’s room,” he says, and it feels a shard is embedding itself, prying us apart.
Sanne steps from her bedroom, her hands fists in her eyes. Then she stretches her lily arms high, and turns. She sees me squatting, Rune looming.
“Mor’s sick,” Rune says.
“Is she…?” Sanne looks from Rune to me and back. Her eyes speak a language I don’t read.
“She got a call,” Rune says. “She knows what I guess you already knew. I wish you would have told me.”
“And I wish you would have told me,” Sanne says.
“I didn’t know,” Rune says.
“You knew enough,” Sanne says.
So the days pass, and the nights and the days, and my illness passes. But a coating covers the preacher and Rune. And Sanne, too. A kind of viscous weight that makes their days before seem frivolous, and too slick, too easy. I tiptoe around the stickiness, as life with Mother taught me: I pretend I didn’t hear, didn’t see, don’t know even what I do know.
The preacher doesn’t preach for a week, then two. And she doesn’t begin my schooling. Rune avoids me, or this world, or himself; I’m not sure. He has a look that reminds me of Madapple Mother. There is a distance in his eyes, an awkwardness in his step. He seems transported, like Mother, to that other time and space: a time before me, a space without me. When our eyes meet, they don’t meet; his pass through me, around me. I feel invisible to him.
Sanne does acknowledge me, but only to ask that I read and translate and translate and read. She doesn’t speak of the preacher; she doesn’t speak of Rune. She stares at the same page for an hour. She asks me to read the same book twice, and again. She forgets what I tell her. She forgets what she’s doing. She forgets the day of the week.
And although I do read and translate, I forget, too: what I read, what I translate. I’ve also entered the fog. What’s happened here? I wonder. What’s changed? I can make no sense of this new world.
I walk into the kitchen now; it sits at the sanctuary’s rear. The door swings open and closed and stirs the stench. I see the corroded dishes piled askew. And the tackiness that is everywhere. And bread with blue moss. I’ve barely eaten in days, but someone has, I see. And yet, maybe not. As I begin to clean, I see the piled dishes are piled with food. Someone had the idea to eat, it seems. Not the ability to eat. I pull out the garbage bin to scrape in the old food, and I see them.
I see me: Rune’s pictures, his drawings.
I free one of them, try to salvage it. But my painted face is torn and muddied, my body creased and smeared.
Why did he do this? How could he do this, throw these away? He was so proud of them. And I feel a hurt that’s deep. And strange. And I long for Mother, for Hartswell.
I leave the kitchen, the church. I walk into Bethan. It’s the first time I’ve left the church since arriving, and I’m surprised by this now. Surprised it hadn’t occurred to me to leave. I remember arriving here in the car, meeting the boy-man, losing my car. I remember the abundance of heat, the abundance of skin, the abundance of noise. And yet, I don’t remember. I’m a different person now: a person with a place. I feel the Bethan air, see the Bethan skin, hear the Bethan noise, yet it doesn’t seem any of these winds could just blow me away. As I walk back to the church, I long less for Mother and Hartswell,
more for the Rune who made me laugh. For the Sanne with zeal. For the preacher with the power to heal.
The preacher answers my prayer.
The day after my walk into Bethan, nearly three weeks after her fall, she resurfaces, and she’s the eruption of spring, even though the weather has cooled and the leaves fall. She opens the church, preaches on the trials of Job, sings and laughs. And I feel my spirit lift again, and fill again. And when I see Sanne laugh, I have hope the preacher and Sanne and Rune have begun their journey from the parallel universe back to me.
SOLOMON’S SEAL
2007
—Please state your name for the record.
—Hagen Grass.
—How old are you, Hagen?
—Seventeen.
—You live in Bethan?
—Well, I did my whole life until three, four years ago. My sister got into some trouble, so we moved away. My sister stayed here, you know, with the church. But my parents and I moved away.
—What church are you referring to, Hagen?
—The Charisma Pentecostal Church.
—Do you know the defendant? The woman here, named Aslaug?
—She went to our church for a while. Before we moved.
—To the Charisma Church? The one that burned down?
—Yeah.
—How long did she attend the church?
—A couple of months.
—Did you get to know her during those months?
—Not really. She kind of gave me the creeps. She stared at everybody all the time.
—Objection. Move to strike. Relevance.
—Sustained.
—Hagen, I’m trying to establish how long Aslaug attended your church. You said she attended the church for a couple of months. Are you sure about this?
—Yeah. I remember Pastor Sara announcing Aslaug was visiting, you know. Aslaug was related to Pastor. And then a few months later, Pastor announced during church that Aslaug had moved back to wherever she’d come from. I remember it because my parents were talking about moving then. Like I said, my older sister had gotten into some trouble, and it was really hard on my parents. I remember wondering where Aslaug had moved to, you know, just because we were talking about moving, too.
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