by Nisi Shawl
∞
I saw him almost every day after he came back. My pillows smelled like burnt sugar. I found myself daydreaming about the black silk luster of his hair and those intoxicating gold-brown eyes. After six weeks I gave him a key to my apartment. I’d never given anyone a key to my apartment.
One night, I came home from work to find Etienne in my kitchen cooking gumbo for dinner. The smell of spices made my mouth water. When he saw me, he smiled and filled a bowl full of hot rice and ladled out the gumbo over it. He got a couple of beers from the fridge and a small jar of filé. He said, “You just sprinkle a little over it. It thickens it a little and improves the flavor.”
I did, and he was right. The spicy andouille sausage made my mouth tingle a little, and I probably drank more beer than I was used to. I felt heady and reckless. I watched him pop a plump, tender, pink shrimp between his plump, tender, pink lips and I blurted out, “I love you.”
I had never said that to anyone before. He smiled and put his hand on top of mine. He said, “I love you too.”
“I don’t know what this means, yet.”
He laughed. “What it means, my darling Raymond, is that you will always be mine. Always.”
It was over ninety that afternoon, but I shivered.
∞
The next night I went to Griffith Park. I walked through the tunnels beneath the observatory to a place where the branches in the trees arched overhead to blot out the stars and the city lights. I followed a broken path through the underbrush to a place where the men waited in lines and sized each other up. It smelled like musk and piss and decaying leaves. Juniper berries crunched underfoot. The sharp, pungent smell reminded me of well gin and tonics.
A lean, sullen Latino nodded at me. He was unshaven and scruffy but handsome enough. He was more than handsome enough for what I wanted. A thin, pale scar ran along the line of his chin. He licked his lips, and I followed him through underbrush to a hollowed out place beneath an evergreen oak. He gripped my shoulders. His hands were rough, and I could feel the calluses through the thin cotton of my polo shirt.
“Don’t see too many pretty blond things like you down here lookin’ for trade.” He ran his tongue over his teeth. One of his incisors was blackened and dead.
“I’m not most pretty blond things.”
“You come here to get punished?” He unzipped his jeans and leaned back.
I sank to my knees.
∞
Etienne was not in my apartment when I got back. But the fragrance of burnt sugar lingered in the air. He had been there.
My cheeks were hot and my lips felt swollen. The hems of my jeans stank of mud. I had raised, red, angry-looking welts on my arms where tiny things had bitten me. There was grass in my hair. I put my face in my hands. They smelled like sweat and pond water, and a little like bleach.
I sat on the rim of the tub and ran the shower for a long time before finally stepping into the veil of steaming water.
Without bothering to dry off or get dressed, I dripped into the living room and picked up the phone. Lisa, my boss at Prescott, was speed dial #3.
Without preamble I blurted, “Lisa, you know that favor you say you owe me? The super big one?”
“Ray?” She drawled out the vowel in my name. “It’s after midnight. I don’t think—”
“I know. But I’m calling it in. You know that little island that you loved so much? I need to go there.”
“Now? Ray, are you in trouble? I know people—”
“Not now. But soon. It’s not trouble, but I need to just go away for a while. Can you help me?”
“Of course I can.”
∞
“I just need time away.” My voice echoed back at me, distorted and whiny. I hate cell phones.
“But I don’t understand.” Etienne’s voice was smooth even when he was upset. “Why didn’t you talk to me about this?”
“I just couldn’t. I don’t expect it to make sense. Just please accept it. I still love you.”
“Where are you?” His concern was so convincing.
“I’m at the airport. It’s too late to talk me out of this.”
“Why are you doing this?” His voice was mild.
“Because when I’m around you I don’t think straight. I don’t make the right decisions.”
“I’m the wrong decision?”
“I don’t know. I need to go away and find out.”
“Tell me where you’re going. At least give me that much.”
“No.” I clenched my fists. “No. This has to be this way. If you love me, you’ve got to understand.”
“Ray. Ray? Don’t you know that you’ll always be mine? Don’t you know that?”
I hit the end button.
Always? We’ll see.
∞
I rented a little colonial house on the island. There were no screens in the windows, only shutters to close against storms. But the bed came with mosquito netting, and the landlady left me several orange candles to keep away bugs. The beautiful, brown island boys all pretended to be macho in the day, but some of them came calling in the night for secretive love-making. They mostly liked to do it outside, in the mango groves.
I biked into the town for bread and fruit. Sometimes I stopped at brightly colored market stalls for bundles of roasted meat and rice wrapped in banana leaves. I’d greedily unwrap them and try to devour them hot off the grill. So hot that I’d burn my fingers and I’d stick them into my mouth and suck at the savory juices.
I tried not to think about Etienne.
But the dreams started. Two nights after I arrived on the island I had the first one. I was back in my own my kitchen. But the scale of everything was wrong; the countertops were higher than my head, the ceiling lost in shadows. All the angles were off, sharper than they should have been. Shadows moved independently of the light. The tiles on the walls were the same oozing pink as underdone pork loin; they seemed to pulse slowly in the flickering lights. I looked down at my hands; the skin turned gray and began to crack and peel, the flesh beneath a dull, dark red. I looked up again, and Etienne towered over me. He must have been eight feet tall. His face seemed carved out of polished wood. His voice rumbled from somewhere, reverberating through my bones though his mouth did not move. “Come back to me.”
I sat upright—the mosquito netting scratched my face—and stared into the gloomy corners of the room. There was no one there.
The next morning I went to the beach and swam for a while in the clear, bracing water. Afterwards, I lay in the hot, powdery sand and stared up at the vast expanse of sky. I thought about how it stretched above, beyond the horizon, never touching down on the land below. I wanted to be the sky.
That night I dreamt about him again. The dream began the same, but this time when I turned to run I couldn’t. Without moving its lips, the towering mask-face said, “Raymond, you must return to me. You are being foolish. Don’t you know what always means? Come home.”
I woke up and shouted “No!” to an empty room.
That day it rained. I stayed in the little house and read Jane Austen by hurricane lamp. The rain beat out a tribal tattoo on the tin roof. The palm trees rustled and swayed with the wind. None of the island boys knocked on my door.
In that night’s dream, Etienne’s bourbon-colored eyes smoldered from behind his mask-face. There was a smoky intensity to them that frightened me. He said, “Why do you force my hand? Don’t you know I love you? Come back to me!”
“I can’t!” I cried. I wanted to run away. My limbs were disobedient and weightless. I tried to turn my head, but I was fascinated by his gaze.
He advanced on me steadily with the slow, inexorable pacing of the bogeyman. My kitchen rippled and ran; the pink, oozing tiles pooled in rivulets. Then, somehow I was back in my island room, trapped in my bed with Etienne still advancing towards me. With his left hand he ripped the mosquito netting to pieces. He stared at me. Tears welled up in his eyes; his face was no longer a mas
k. He blew me a kiss with his right hand. It felt like being slapped.
When I woke up the next morning, my face was covered in a gritty, white powder. I got up and took a shower and washed it away. My joints felt stiff and I was tired. There was a little red nick on my cheek, but I chalked it up to an insect bite and ignored it.
The mosquito netting lay on the floor in a ragged heap.
∞
I decided to go to the bar that night. A wooden sign above the door says it’s Callisto’s Cantina, but everyone local just calls it Ed’s. Ed is the bartender. He’s a Vietnam vet who moved here in the eighties after a disability settlement. He always tried to get me to go with him to the only whorehouse in town, said he could get us a discount on the prettiest girls. I just laughed and changed the subject. I figured it was better not to mention my disinterest in the ladies; Ed might have charged me more for drinks. I didn’t feel very well that night. When I came in he said, “You’re looking real pale, Kiddo. Maybe you need to get your pickle wet? Good-looking kid like you will go blind if you keep it all for Rosie Palms and her five sisters.”
“You’re a braver man than I am. I’m waiting for the right one.”
Ed leered. “Y’can have a sample of more’n a couple of right ones for less than two hundred bucks.”
“I’ll take your word for it. Gin and tonic, please.”
“Just sayin’” Ed grunted as he pulled a bottle of Bombay Sapphire off the shelf behind him. “You ain’t gonna be so good lookin’ if you grow hair on them palms.”
I took a sip from my drink. My hands trembled. I gripped the bar for support. My knuckles were white. I gasped like a fish. Ed wheeled on me and barked, “You alright?”
I toppled over and fell onto the floor. My precious drink crashed down next to me and spilled out into the earth. My chest shuddered and then lay still. Ed shouted, “Someone get Doctor Camille!”
One of the local boys barreled out of the bar. Ed leaned over me, shook me by the shoulders, then gripped the side of my neck. He said, “Shit!” and then cracked his knuckles. He leaned my head back and reached into my mouth to sweep out anything lodged in there. He blew two quick, hard breaths into my mouth. I felt my chest expand. It was painful.
Ed laced his hairy, bearlike paws together and pressed them to my chest. He pushed down hard. The pressure was awful. I heard a sound like tree branches snapping in the wind. It was my ribs. Ed counted out, “one and two and three and four…” and pressed down hard on my chest on each number. Jagged, sharp little bits ripped into me. At the end of his count, Ed leaned my head back and blew two quick breaths into my mouth again. My stomach roiled and my gorge rose unbidden. On the second breath, I vomited onto Ed’s face.
“Fuck!” He wiped his face clear with the back of his arm and went back to pressing down on my chest.
After several sets of breaths and compressions, Doctor Camille burst into the bar, breathless. She waved at Ed to move away. Camille knelt down next to me. She felt my wrist for a pulse. She took out a stethoscope from her bag and listened to my chest. She looked up at Ed and asked, “How long have you been doing CPR?”
“A little more’n twenty minutes.”
Camille said, “His heart’s not beating. See the purply-red color on the back of his neck? He’s gone livid. CPR’s no use to him anymore. Poor kid. He died so young.”
I tried to scream that I wasn’t dead, but I couldn’t even whimper. Ed sighed. “He was a good kid. What do I do with the body?”
“Well, people around here are suspicious of corpses. I’d suggest you have it cremated so they don’t think he’ll spread the plague.”
I imagined being shut in the oven, able to feel the flames as well as I could feel the floor beneath me now. I would roast alive unless I could manage to move or scream or something. But still my body betrayed me and didn’t even twitch.
Ed said, “I think he was a Jew. Those people don’t like being burnt.”
“Suit yourself. Look, I’ve got a birth to attend to. Are you okay here? Want me to see if I can find a Rabbi?”
“I’m fine. Don’t worry, Camille, I’ll try’n take care of this mess. I’ll make some calls.”
I wasn’t Jewish. But I was thankful to Ed for not giving my body over to be burnt. A fly walked over my eyeball. It tickled. I couldn’t laugh. He made some calls from the rotary phone in the back of the bar. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Ed came back over to me, clucked his tongue, and went through my pockets. He took my wallet.
Four young men showed up with a graying, tattered sheet. I recognized one of them from a tryst in the mango groves. They picked me up and wrapped me in the sheet. I couldn’t see anything and sound was muffled. One of them said, “You want this boy to have a marker on his grave?”
“I didn’t even know his name,” Ed said.
∞
They carried me out. One of them hummed a low, sad song. They shoved me into a box. My tailbone hurt where it hit the bottom. I think the box was pine. I could smell the resin. I heard a lid sliding over the top. I tried again to scream, to twitch, to cry out. But there was only the sound of a hammer hitting nails.
They lowered me into the ground. I could smell the loam. I could hear the clunk of the shovels digging into the earth and feel the casket rock a little each time the dirt hit the lid. The wood began to creak and whine. It made sounds like logs cracking over a fire. Dirt found cracks and splits and sprinkled over my sheet. It was cool. Things wriggled in the dirt. Feelers searched for exposed skin. Tiny legs crawled over me. I felt a sharp pinch at the back of my knee. Pincers dug into the soft flesh there and in my armpits. Something loathsome and long tried to wriggle inside my ear.
There was only darkness. Unless you have been in caves without a guiding light, you have never been anywhere the dark is so complete. Even in the darkest places your eyes adjust to make out shapes and forms and the hint of color. Under the earth there are no shapes, no forms and no colors. But there was the sound of cracking wood, the dense smell of soil, and the awful, feathery feel of questing antennae and clicking pincers searching for tender flesh. The bites were almost a relief; the things stopped moving while they fed.
∞
I don’t know how long I spent down there with the darkness and the moans of wood bending under the weight of the earth and the sinister, scrabbling sounds of hungry creatures. But soon I heard something else. It was the sound of digging. It was steady and grew louder as time passed. There was a loud whack and I felt my casket shake as the shovel hit its lid. The shovel sounds and the scraping sounds increased feverishly as the digger began to move away the earth covering me. There was a sudden crack of splintering wood. Cool night air rushed into the small space that had been my world. I ached in all the places that many-legged things had torn into skin. Strong hands ripped away the shroud covering my eyes. The moon was full and huge and seemed bright as the sun.
Backlit by the swollen beaten-brass moon, staring down into my grave, stood Etienne. He was beautiful, of course. Around him were the four men who had buried me. Each one had a shovel in his hand. They stared at him with awe, but he only looked at me.
“Rise,” he said. And my body began to twitch at his command. He said once more, “Rise.” And I scrabbled up the sides of the grave and lurched towards him with shambling, unsteady steps. He brushed his hand across my cheek. His touch was gentle. His skin was warm. I saw no malice in his eyes. He shook his head at me and said, “I told you that you would always be mine. Always. Come with me now.”
And I followed him. There is no such place as away for me anymore.
Falling into the Earth
Shweta Narayan
1. Foundling
The king her father found her in a furrow, so the story goes, and named her after it. Sita, daughter of the Earth.
Sita: a place where seed is planted.
§
Mama and Papa have talked about your adoption so often you dream of it; wailing in the agency doctor’s hu
ge dark arms while Mama and Papa sort through the papers and the bill. (American dollars only, Ayah says.) The room is pale yellow and it smells of disinfectant, like bathrooms in the morning. A tube light flickers silver in Mama’s hair. Papa counts out dull green notes. Lots of them.
You fall, dream-soft, into Mama’s arms, and are caught in a yellowing photograph: pale against her pink sari, her arms gently pulling you close, supporting your neck with one hand. Papa was an obstetrician and Mama a pediatrician; they both know how to hold babies.
“Our own foundling,” says Papa, beaming. Your black hair is vivid against Mama’s grey. You are nothing like the red-faced bald babies he delivered in America. “Our Sita.”
§
Ayah adds that you’re a black market baby. She has been with the family for long enough to say these things. You should always be grateful for it, she says while she brushes out your hair, because you were born to the sort that gives a child up for adoption. Maybe even an unmarried mother, like in Aradhana.
Here, you’re a princess.
Ayah doesn’t have to tell you to sit still while she tugs through the tangles; gratitude means being that princess, playing her role. Mama is too frail for disappointments.
You dream of falling into dark earth soft as Mama’s arms.
2. Swayamvara
Sita’s father held a competition when she came of age, a grand event to which all her hopeful suitors were invited. The princes and kings, great archers all, were challenged to string a bow infused with divine power.
Perhaps Rama and Sita met in secret and fell in love, and she prayed for him to succeed. Perhaps she prayed for the perfect man.
Perhaps he was just strong.
After every other man strained to lift the bow a finger’s width, struggled, and gave up, Rama picked it up one-handed and strung it. He drew back the string, and broke the bow in two.
§
Arranged marriages are not so very arranged these days. Mama doesn’t want you on anything as vulgar as a marriage website, but you get to choose your groom from the eligible boys that she and Papa’s cousins know.
