The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m sorry if I bothered you,” I said.

  She sighed and didn’t take her eyes off the window. “You haven’t bothered me, India Wilkes. But watch your skin. Don’t you wear so many clothes. Nobody knows to watch after their skin anymore. Look at ’em. Nobody on this bus watches their skin, so it waltzes in the night. You watch skin, or it moves around.”

  I gave her five dollars, though she didn’t ask me for it. She held the bill wadded up in her left hand, which wasn’t clean. She didn’t appear to have bathed recently.

  “I’ll watch my skin more closely,” I assured her. “You stay warm, and get something to eat.”

  She didn’t reply, and I got off at the next stop. The bus driver wanted to know if Teodora had been bothering me, or panhandling. “No,” I told him. “We were just talking.” Then he looked at me funny. “You say so,” he said.

  Back home on Willow Street, Abalyn was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of her television playing a game called Fallout: New Vegas. I only knew the name because she’d told me the night before. She was playing a character named Courier who was wandering about a post-apocalyptic Mojave Desert trying to find a lost package containing a platinum poker chip. None of it made much sense to me. I told her I was going to write the story, and that I’d be in the blue room with too many bookshelves.

  “Do you want me to remind you about dinner?” she asked. I said if I got hungry—and I knew I probably wouldn’t—I’d come out and find something to eat. But I thanked her for offering, anyway.

  And so I wrote my story about the November Eva I didn’t find on Valentine Road, only it came out more of a story about Albert Perrault and Elizabeth Short. It came out as it needed to come. Because I couldn’t manage a recitation of false facts, I managed a recitation of truth. I was worried Dr. Ogilvy might question the utility of having written a story about the wolf that was only indirectly my story of the wolf. But she didn’t, even when I suggested I’d only set one box within another, that all I’d accomplished was the creation of a fiction to contain another fiction.

  “If the fiction has been contained,” she replied, “then you’ve gained control over it.” And I didn’t argue with her. It took me five days (and nights) to write “Werewolf Smile,” and I’m never going to try to sell it to a magazine. It belongs to no one except me.

  Werewolf Smile

  BY INDIA MORGAN PHELPS

  I don’t know whether it’s true that Eva slept with Perrault. Probably it is. I know she slept with plenty enough men—men and other women—those nights when she’d slip away from me, wrapped in a caul of cigarette smoke, perfume, and halfhearted deceit. She’d laugh whenever anyone dared to call her polyamorous. Unless, of course, she was in one of her black moods, and then she might do something worse than laugh. I never called her polyamorous, because I knew that she never loved any of them, any more than she loved me. There was no amour in those trysts. “I fuck around,” she would say, or something like that. “It doesn’t need a fancy fucking Greek word for it, or a fucking flag in a pride parade. I’m a wanton. I sleep around.” Then, she might ask, “What’s got me wondering, Winter, is why you don’t.” She almost never used my actual name, and I never asked why she’d started calling me Winter. We met in July, after all. On a very hot day in July. But, sure, she might have slept with Albert Perrault. She liked to call herself his disciple. I heard her call herself that on more than one occasion. She fancied herself somehow favored by him. Favored beyond the bedclothes, I mean to say. It pleased her, imagining herself as more to him than a mere student, as though he were some unholy prophet, Eva’s very own bête noire come to lead her down to places she’d spent her life only half imagining and never daring to dream she might one day glimpse. She assumed—from his paintings, from what he painted—he had glimpsed them, from his paintings, from what he painted. She assumed he had something to show anyone besides the paintings. Eva assumed a lot of things. But don’t ask me what he truly thought of her. I hardly ever spoke with him, and then only briefly, and it was never anything but the most superficial sorts of conversation. Our exchanges were cursory, perfunctory, slipshod, though never exactly awkward. I don’t know what he thought of her as an artist, or as a lover, or if he derived some satisfaction from my suspicion about the two of them. Sometimes, I wanted to warn him (I’d often wanted to warn others about Eva), but I never had the nerve, or I never had the heart, and, besides, that probably would have been like warning Herod about Salome. And, likely, I’d have only succeeded in appearing jealous, the disgruntled green-eyed third in a disconnected ménage à trois trying to gum up the works. I can see how my feelings for Eva might be misinterpreted. But I do not hate her. I love her, as I have loved her since the hot July day we met, almost five years ago, and I know that’s why I’m damned. Because I cannot push away. I am unable to push away. Even after all her lovers, after Perrault, and the Dahlia, and all the things she’s done and said, the hideous things I’ve seen because of her, all that shit that’s going to be in my head forever and ever, I still love her. I seem to have no choice whatsoever in the matter, because I have certainly tried to hate Eva. But I have found that trying not to love her is like someone trying to wish herself well; thinking, for example, I could simply will a gangrenous wound back to healthy pink flesh again. You cut away necrosis, or you die, and I plainly lack whatever cardinal resolve is necessary to cut Eva out of me. And I wonder, now, if she ever had these same thoughts, about me, or about Albert Perrault? I cast her as I have, and as she claims herself to be, a willing plague vector, but perhaps Eva was also merely one of the infected. She may well not have been a Typhoid Mary of the mind and soul. I can’t know for sure, one way or the other, and I’m weary of speculation. So, better I restrict these meanderings to what I at least believe I know than to speculate, yes? And when I sat down to write about her and about Perrault, I had in mind the Dahlia, in particular, not all these useless (and generally abstract) questions of love and fidelity and intent. How can I pretend to have known Eva’s intentions? She called herself a liar as frequently as she called herself a wanton and a slut. She was the physical embodiment of the pseudomenon, a conscious, animate incarnation of the Liar’s Paradox.

  “Oh, Winter, everything I’ve ever told you or ever will tell you is a lie, but this, this one thing is true.”

  Now, work with that. And I’m not speaking in metaphors, or paraphrasing. And I do not, here, have to rely upon an inevitably unreliable memory, because when she said those very words, I was so taken aback, so galled at the audacity, that, less than an hour later, I scribbled it down in the black Moleskine notebook Eva presented me on the occasion of my thirty-fifth birthday. That is what she said. And I sat very still, and I listened, because how could I refuse to hear the one truth uttered by a woman who will never be permitted to speak one truth? I sat on the floor of my apartment (I never thought of it as our apartment), and I listened. “It scared the living shit out of me,” she said, “and I have never seen anything so beautiful.” This, I suppose, was her one true thing, which, perforce, must also be false. But she continued for quite some time thereafter, and I sat beneath the window, not not listening. There was a Smiths CD in the stereo, set on repeat, and I think the disc played twice through before she was done describing to me plans for Perrault’s new installation. “The parallel is obvious, of course, and he acknowledges that up front. Le Petit Chaperon Rouge, Little Red Riding Hood, Rotkäppchen, and so forth. The genius is not in having made the association, but in the execution. The cumulative effect of the assembled elements, both his paintings and the reproductions of various artifacts relating to the murder of Elizabeth Short.” Eva laughed at me when I told her it all sounded pretentious and unspeakably morbid. She laughed loudly, and reminded me of games that we had played, of scenes beyond counting. “I know, Winter, you like to pretend your heart’s not as rotten as mine, but do try not to be such a goddamn hypocrite about it.” And there’s our lovely paradox once more, because she was
absolutely right, of course. I don’t recall interrupting her again that night. I can’t even recall which Smiths CD was playing. Not so much as one single song. “You know,” she said, “before the ‘Black Dahlia’ moniker stuck, the newspapers in Los Angeles were calling it the ‘werewolf murder.’” She was silent a moment then, just staring at me, and I realized I’d missed a cue, that I’d almost forgotten my line. “Why?” I asked belatedly. “Why did they call it that?” She lit a cigarette and blew smoke towards the high white ceiling. She shrugged. “Albert tried to find out, but no one seems to know. Back then, LA journalists were always coming up with these lurid names for murders. Lots of times, they had to do with flowers. The White Gardenia Murder, the Red Hibiscus Murder, and so on. He thinks the werewolf thing maybe had something to do with the smile the killer carved into her face, pretty much ear to ear. That it sort of made Short look like a wolf. But that still doesn’t make much sense to me. I assumed that the newspapermen were referring to the murderer as the werewolf, not to the victim.” That’s the only time I ever heard Eva disagree with Perrault. She shrugged again and took another drag off her cigarette. “Either way, it’s a great angle, and he means to make the most of it. He hasn’t told me exactly how, not exactly, not yet. But I know he’s been talking to a taxidermist. Some guy he worked with once before.” And she went on like this, and I sat and listened. “It’s very exciting,” Eva continued, “seeing him branch out, explore other media. He did that thing with the stones last year in New York, the stones inside their cages. That’s what really set him moving in this direction. That’s what he says. Oh, and I haven’t told you. He got a call from someone in Hollywood last week. He won’t say who, but it’s someone big.” I promise, for what that might be worth, I am not trying to make Eva sound any more or less insipid or sycophantic than she actually did that night. She knew I didn’t care for Perrault’s work, that it gave me the willies, which is probably why she spent so much time talking about it. Come to think, that’s probably why she started fucking him to begin with (assuming that I am not mistaken on that count, assuming she actually did fuck him).

  But wait.

  I’ve said too much about that night. I didn’t intend to drone on about that night, but merely present it as prologue to what came afterwards. It was winter, late winter in Boston, and an especially snowy winter at that. I’d just started the bookshop job, and sometimes I picked up a spare shift at a coffeehouse on Newbury Street. I don’t think Eva was working at the time, except she’d taken to calling herself Perrault’s personal assistant, and he’d taken to letting her get away with it. But I’m not sure any genuine work was involved; I’m certain no money was. Eva was only a slut. She never had the requisite motivation to be anything so useful or lucrative as a whore. But, playing his PA, she was involved in all the nasty shit he was getting up to that winter, planning the show in LA, the Dahlia. Perrault decided early on to call the installation The Voyeur of Utter Destruction, after some David Bowie song or another. I heard through Eva, Perrault had landed a book deal from a Manhattan publisher, a glossy, full-color folio affair, though it wasn’t paying much. I heard from Eva he didn’t care about the small advance, because he’d gotten color. Frankly, I heard most of what I heard about Albert Perrault through Eva, not via my own aforementioned perfunctory conversations with the man. Anyhow, the same day Eva told me about the book, she also told me that she was going to be his model for several of the sculptural pieces in the installation. Life casts had to be made, which meant she had to fly out to LA, because he had a makeup-artist friend at some special-effects studio or another who’d agreed to do that part free of charge. I understand Perrault was quite good at getting people to do things for him for free. Eva, for example. So, she was gone most of a week in February, during the worst of the snow, and I had the apartment and the bed all to myself. When I wasn’t working or slogging to or home from work through the black-gray slush drowning the streets, or riding the T, I slept and watched old movies and halfheartedly read from a collection by Nabokov, A Russian Beauty and Other Stories. The book was a first edition, signed by the author, and actually belonged to Perrault. He’d loaned it to Eva, advising her to read it, cover to cover, but Eva rarely read anything except astrology and self-help crap. Oh, she had subscriptions to The New Yorker and Wired and Interview, because she thought they looked good lying on the coffee table. Or rather, because she thought they made her look good. But she never read the magazines, and she’d not read a page of the Nabokov collection, either. I read most of it while she was gone to California, but can only recall one story, about a midget named Fred Dobson. Fred Dobson got someone pregnant and died at the end, and that’s about all I remember. Eva came home on a Friday night, and she was uncharacteristically taciturn. Mostly, she sat alone in the kitchenette, smoking and drinking steaming cups of herbal tea. On Saturday night, we fucked, the first time since she’d started seeing Perrault. She had me use the double-ended silicone dildo, which was fine by me. I came twice. I’m not sure how many times Eva came, because she was always so quiet during sex, always so quiet and still. Afterwards, we lay together, and it was almost like the beginning, right after we met, before I understood about necrosis. We watched the big bay window above the bed, flakes of snow spiraling lazily down from a Dreamsicle sky. She said, “In Japan, they call them harigata,” and it took me a moment to realize she was talking about the double-ended dildo. “At least that’s what Albert says,” she added, and the illusion that we might be back at the start, that I did not yet know the truth of her, immediately dissolved. I lay still, Eva in my arms, watching the snow sticking to the windowpane. Some of it melted, and some of it didn’t. I asked her if she was okay, if maybe something had happened while she was away in Los Angeles. She told me no, nothing had happened, but it was intense, all the same, working that closely with Perrault. “It’s like being in his head sometimes, like I’m just another canvas or a few handfuls of clay.” She fell asleep not long afterwards, and I got up and pissed, checked my email, and then watched TV almost until dawn, even though I had to work the next day. I didn’t want to be in the same bed with whatever she was dreaming that night.

  I didn’t see her again for two or three days. She took the train down to Providence, some errand for Perrault. She didn’t go into the details, and I didn’t bother to ask. When she came home, though, Eva was mostly her old self again. We ordered Chinese takeout, moo goo whatever, kung pao pigeon, and she talked about the life castings she’d done. Her body nude and slicked with Vaseline, and then they’d covered her with a thick coating of blue alginate, and when that had set, they’d covered the alginate with plaster bandages, making the molds for Perrault’s sculptures from her living corpse. I asked if they put straws up her nose so she could breathe, and she laughed and frowned. “They don’t do that,” she replied. “They’re just careful not to cover your nostrils. It was claustrophobic, but in a good way.” She told me that each mold would be used only once and then destroyed, and that they did five separate life castings of her over five consecutive days. “When it hardens, you can’t move?” I asked, and she frowned again and said, “Of course you can’t move. That would ruin everything, if you were to move.” I didn’t ask exactly what Perrault intended to do with the casts, and Eva didn’t say. It was the next evening, though, that she produced a photograph of one of Albert Perrault’s paintings and asked me to look at it, please. Eva never, ever fucking said please, so that was sort of a red flag, when she did. She was sweating, though it was chilly in the apartment, because the radiator was acting up again. She was sweating, and she looked sick. I asked if she had a fever, and Eva shook her head. I asked if she was sure, because maybe she’d picked up something on the plane, or while she was in LA, and she made a snarling sound and shoved the photograph into my hands. It was in color, an eight-by-ten printed on matte paper. There was a sticker on the back with the painting’s title typed neatly, black Courier font on white. It read Fecunda ratis, and there was a date (which
I can’t recollect). Written directly on the back of the photo, with what I took to have been a ballpoint pen, were the words “De puella a lupellis seruata,” about a girl saved from wolf cubs, circa 1022–1024; Egbert of Liège. “So who is this Egbert of Liège?” I asked. She glared at me, and for a second or three I thought she was going to hit me. It wouldn’t have been the first time. “How the hell am I supposed to know?” she snapped, trading in my question for a question of her own. “Will you fucking look at the front? Winter, look at the front of the picture, not the goddamn back of it, for Christ’s sake.” I nodded and turned the photograph over. I recognized it immediately as one of Perrault’s, even though I’d never seen that particular painting before. There’s something about the easy violence, the deliberate carelessness of his brushstrokes. Almost like Edvard Munch trying to forge a Van Gogh, almost. At first, any simple representational image, any indication of the painting’s composition, refused to emerge from the sooty blur of oils, the innumerable shades of gray broken only by the faintest rumors of green and alabaster. There was a single crimson smudge floating near the center of the photograph, a chromatic counterpoint to all the murk. I thought it looked like a wound. I didn’t say that to Eva, but that’s the impression I got. As if maybe someone, Perrault or someone else, had taken a knife or a pair of scissors to the canvas. Heaven knows, I’ve wanted to do it myself, on more than one occasion. I would even argue that, at times, his art seems intended to provoke precisely that reaction. Art designed, premeditated, to elicit the primal fight-or-flight response, to reach in and give the hindbrain a good squeeze, dividing the predators from the prey. “What do you see?” Eva asked me. And I said, “Another one of Perrault’s shitty paintings.” “Don’t be an ass,” she replied. “Tell me what you see.” I told her I’d thought she wanted my honest opinion, and she gave me the finger; I had it coming, I suppose. I looked at her, and she was still sweating, and was also chewing at her lower lip. Peering into her eyes was almost as bad as trying to make sense of Fecunda ratis, so I turned back to the somber chaos of the photograph. “Is this one going to be in the show?” I asked. “No,” she said, and then, “I don’t know. Maybe, but I don’t think so. It’s old, but he says it’s relevant. Albert doesn’t have it anymore, sold it to a collector after a show in Atlanta. I don’t know if he still has access to it.” I listened, but didn’t reply. Her voice was shaking, like the words were not quite connecting one against the other, and I tried harder to concentrate on making sense of Fecunda ratis. I wished I had a drink, and I almost asked Eva for one of the American Spirit cigarettes she’d begun smoking after meeting Perrault, though I’d stopped smoking years before. My mouth was so dry. I felt as though my cheeks had been stuffed with cotton balls, my mouth had gone so dry. “What do you see?” she asked again, sounding desperate, almost whispering, but I ignored her. Because, suddenly, the blur was beginning to resolve into definite shapes, shadows and the solid objects that cast shadows. Figures and landscape and sky. The crimson smudge was the key. “Little Red Riding Hood,” I said, and Eva laughed, but very softly, as if she were only laughing to herself. “Little Red Riding Hood,” she echoed, and I nodded my head again. The red smudge formed a still point, a nexus or fulcrum, in the swirl, and I saw it was meant to be a cap or a hat, a crimson wool cap perched on the head of a nude girl who was down on her hands and knees. Her head was bowed, so that her face was hidden from view. There was only a wild snarl of hair, and that cruel, incongruent red cap. Yes, that cruel red cap, for I could not then and cannot now interpret any element of that painting as anything but malevolent. Even the kneeling girl, made a blood sacrifice, struck me as a conspirator. She was surrounded by pitchy, hulking forms, and I briefly believed them to be tall standing stones, dolmens, some crude megalithic ring with the girl at its center. But then I realized, no, they were meant to be beasts of some sort. Huge shaggy things squatting on their haunches, watching the girl. The painting had captured the final, lingering moment before a kill. But I didn’t think kill. I thought murder, though the forms surrounding the girl appeared to be animals, as I’ve already said. Animals do not do murder, men do. Men and women, and even children, but not animals. “I dream it almost every night,” Eva said, near to tears, and I wanted to tear the photograph apart, rip it into tiny, senseless shreds. I’m not lying when I say that I loved and still love Eva, and Fecunda ratis struck me as some sick game Perrault was playing with her mind, giving her this awful picture and telling her it was relevant to the installation. Expecting her to study it. To fixate and obsess over it. I’ve always felt a certain variety of manipulation is required of artists (painters, sculptors, writers, filmmakers, etc.), but only a few become (or start off as) sadists. I have no doubt whatsoever that Perrault is a sadist, whether or not there was a sexual component present. You can see it in almost everything he’s ever done, and, that night, I could see it in her eyes. “Eva, it’s only Little Red Riding Hood,” I told her, laying the photograph facedown on the coffee table. “It’s only a painting, and you really shouldn’t let him get inside your head like this.” She told me that I didn’t understand, that full immersion was necessary if she was going to be any help to him whatsoever, and then she took the photograph back and sat staring at it. I didn’t say anything more, because I knew nothing more to say to her. There was no way I would come between her and her bête noire, nor even between her and the black beasts he’d created for Fecunda ratis. I stood up and went to the kitchenette to make dinner, even though I wasn’t hungry and, by then, Eva was hardly eating anything. I found a can of Campbell’s chicken and stars soup in the cupboard and asked if she’d eat a bowl if I warmed it up. She didn’t reply. She didn’t say a word, just sat there on the sofa, her blue eyes trained on the photograph, not sparing a glance for anyone or anything else. And that was maybe three weeks before she flew out to Los Angeles for the last time. She never came back to Boston. She never came back to me. I never saw her again. But I suppose I’m getting ahead of myself, even if only slightly so. There would be the one distraught phone call near the end of April, while Perrault would still have been busy working on the pieces for his installation, which was scheduled to open on June 1 at a gallery called Subliminal Thinkspace Collective. It’s easy enough, in retrospect, to say that I should have taken that phone call more seriously. But I was working two jobs and recovering from the flu. I was barely managing to keep the rent paid. It’s not like I could have dropped everything and gone after her. I make a lousy Prince Charming, no fit sort of knight-errant. Anyway, I’m still not sure she wanted me to try. To save her, I mean. It’s even more absurd to imagine Eva as a damsel in distress than to imagine myself as her rescuer. Which only goes to show the fatal traps we may build for ourselves when we fashion personae. Expectation becomes self-fulfilling. Then, later on, we cry and bitch, and pity ourselves, and marvel stupidly at our inability to take action. The therapist I saw for a while said this was “survivor’s guilt.” I asked him, that day, if the trick to a lucrative career in psychology was to tell people whatever might make them feel better, by absolving them of responsibility. I look around me, and I see so many people intent upon absolving themselves of responsibility. On passing the buck, shifting the blame. But I’m the one who did not act, just as Perrault is the one who messed with her head, just as Eva is the one who needed that invasion so badly she was willing to pay for the privilege with her life. All I was paying the therapist was money, and that’s not even quite the truth, as I was piling it all on a MasterCard I never expected to be in a position to pay off. Regardless, during our very next session, Dr. Not To Be Named Herein suggested that some of us are less amenable to therapy than are others, that possibly I did not wish to “get better,” and I stopped seeing him. I can be a guilty survivor on my own, without incurring any additional debt.