What is worse: being locked outside of your own mind, or being locked inside of it?
What is worse: writing a trope or being one? What about being more than one?
I walked to my cabin for the last time. I finally added my name to the tablet above my desk. C——M——, I scrawled. Resident colonist & colonizing resident & madwoman in her own attic.
I threw my novel notes and laptop into the lake. After the plush splash subsided, I heard the sound of girls, laughing. Or maybe it was just the birds.
I drove away from Devil’s Throat in the early-morning darkness. The car barreled down the road that had once seemed so lush and inviting, and as I descended the mountain I felt as if I was being rewound back to the beginning—not just the beginning of the summer, but of my life. The trees whipped past, the same trees that I had observed from a middle-aged woman’s car. Now I was that woman, but I was speeding wildly and the trees flashed by so fast I felt nauseated. No limpid daughter slept in the backseat; no strange teenage girl sat next to me, stewing in her own nightmarish consciousness. (And isn’t that how you become tender, vulnerable? The tissue-softening marination of your own mind, the quicksand of mental indulgence?)
I needed to be home. I needed to be home with my wife, in our home in civilization and away from other artists—at least, the sort of artists who cloister themselves from the rest of the world. Dying profession, dead hotels. I had been foolish.
After I passed through Y——, an orange-limbed sign sat on the side of the road. SPEED LIMIT 45 it read. Beneath, a dark-paneled digital screen was waiting for drivers to approach, to admonish (by blinking) or praise (by not blinking). As I approached, I waited for my own car—now pushing sixty—to register. But the panel remained dark. As I zipped past, I felt a strange sensation, as if someone were pressing a thin membrane to my throat and I was inhaling no air. The thought came so suddenly upon me that my car almost veered off the side of the road. I pressed my fingers to my throat, where my pulse hummed beneath my skin. Fast, but there. I was alive, surely.
How much time had passed since I departed our little house, since I’d seen my wife’s face? What if I’d misstepped and overshot her lifetime, Rip Van Winkled myself away from her in an irreversible act?
I pressed on my brake once, twice, and the dark road behind me flooded red. The light revealed a herd of deer moving liquidly over the pavement, eyes glinting with each tap.
Two hours later, I pulled the car up next to the curb. People drifted along the street, stood on their lawns, watching me. I could not remember if these were the neighbors from before. It seemed like a lifetime since I had last seen their front doors and fences. I stepped out of the car and approached our home, where a woman in a blue dress was kneeling in the dirt, a sun hat concealing her face. My wife was always a morning planter, finding the cool, thin dawn air to be bracing and healthful. She had a dress like that, and a hat. Was that her? Did her shoulders bend and crook with advanced age, or merely with the exhaustion of being married to someone like me?
I walked up to the sidewalk and called her name.
The woman stiffened, and as her head rose up, her sun hat tilted, too. I waited for the outline of her face to emerge from beneath the brim: to assure me I was still needed, to assure me I was still here.
I know what you’re thinking, reader. You’re thinking: Does this woman have the temperament to come to our residency, having failed so thoroughly at this one? Surely she is too fragile, too sick, too mad to eat and sleep and work among other artists. Or, if you’re being a little less generous, perhaps you’re thinking that I’m a cliché— a weak, trembling thing with a silly root of adolescent trauma, straight out of a gothic novel.
But I ask you, readers: Thus far in your jury deliberations, have you encountered any others who have truly met themselves? Some, I’m sure, but not many. I have known many people in my lifetime, and rarely do I find any who have been taken down to the quick, pruned so that their branches might grow back healthier than before.
I can tell you with perfect honesty that the night in the forest was a gift. Many people live and die without ever confronting themselves in the darkness. Pray that one day, you will spin around at the water’s edge, lean over, and be able to count yourself among the lucky.
DIFFICULT AT PARTIES
Afterward, there is no kind of quiet like the one that is in my head.
Paul brings me home from the hospital in his ancient Volvo. The heater is busted and it’s January, so there’s a fleece blanket wedged at the foot of the passenger seat. My body radiates pain, is dense with it. He buckles my seat belt. His hands are shaking. He lifts the blanket and spreads it on my lap. He’s done this before, wrapping it snug around my thighs while I make jokes about being a kid getting tucked into bed. He is cautious and fearful, now.
Stop, I say, and I do it myself.
It is Tuesday. I think it’s Tuesday. The condensation on the inside of the car has frozen. The snow outside is sullied, a dark yellow line carved into its depths. The wind rattles the broken door handle. Across the way, a teenage girl shouts to her friend three unintelligible syllables. Tuesday is speaking to me, in Tuesday’s voice. Open up, it says. Open up.
Paul reaches for the ignition. Around the hole there are scratches in the plastic where I imagine that in his rush to get me, the key had missed its destination over and over again.
The engine struggles a little, as if it doesn’t want to wake up.
…
The first night back in my house, he stands in the doorway of the bedroom with his wide shoulders hunched inward and asks me where I want him to sleep.
With me, I say, as if it’s a ridiculous question. Lock the door, I tell him, and get into bed.
The door is locked.
Lock it again.
He leaves, and I can hear the stifled jerks of a doorknob being tested. He comes back into the bedroom, flips back the covers, buries himself next to me.
I dream of Tuesday. I dream of it from start to finish.
When the thin light of morning stretches across the bed, Paul is sleeping in the recliner in the corner of the room. What are you doing? I ask, pushing the quilt off my body. Why are you there?
He tilts his head up. Around his eye, a smoky-dark bruise is forming.
You were screaming, he says. You were screaming, and I tried to hold you, and you elbowed me in the face.
This is the first time I actually cry.
I am ready, I tell my black-and-blue reflection. Friday.
I draw a bath. The water gushes too hot from the spotted faucet. I peel my pajamas away from my body and they fall like sloughed skin to the tiled floor. I half-expect to look down and see the cage of my ribs, the wet balloons of my lungs.
Steam rises from the bath. I remember a small version of myself, sitting in a hotel hot tub and holding my arms rigid against my torso, rolling around in the churning water. I’m a carrot! I shriek at a woman, who might be my mother. Add some salt! Add some peas! And from her lounge chair she reaches toward me with her hand contorted as if around a handle, the very caricature of a chef with a slotted spoon.
I add a fat dollop of bubble bath.
I slip my foot into the water. There is a second of brilliant heat that slides straight through me, like steel wire through a block of wet clay. I gasp but do not pause. A second foot, less pain. Hands on the sides of the bathtub, I lower myself down. The water hurts, and it is good. The chemicals in the bubble bath burn, and that is better.
I run my toes along the faucet, whispering things to myself, lifting up my breasts with both hands to see how high they can sit; I catch my reflection in the sweaty curve of the stainless steel, tilt my head. On the far side of the tub, I can see the tiny slivers of red polish that have receded from the edges of my toenails. I feel buoyant, bodiless. The water gets too high and threatens the lip of the tub. I turn the faucet off. The bathroom echoes unpleasantly.
I hear the front door open. I tense until I hear t
he rattle of keys on the hallway table. Paul comes into the bathroom.
Hey, he says.
Hey, I say. You had a meeting.
What?
You had a meeting. You’re wearing a dress shirt.
He looks down at himself. Yes, he says, slowly, as if he didn’t believe his shirt had existed until now. Actually, he says, I went and looked at a few apartments.
I don’t want to move, I tell him.
You should find another place. He says this firmly, as if he had spent his entire day building up to this sentence.
I shouldn’t do anything, I say. I don’t want to move.
I think it’s a bad idea to stay. I can help you find a new apartment.
I wind a hand into my hair and pull it away from my skull in a wet sheet. A bad idea for whom?
We stare at each other. My other arm is crossed over my chest; I let it drop.
Unplug the tub for me? I ask.
He kneels in the cold puddle on the tile next to the tub. He unbuttons the sleeve at his wrist and begins to roll it up in a neat, tight coil. He reaches past my legs, into the water still thick with bubbles, down to the bottom. Suds catch on the roll of fabric around his upper arm. I can feel the syncopated drumming of his fingers as he fumbles for the beaded chain, weaves it around them, pulls.
There is a low pop. A lazy bubble of air breaks the water’s surface. He withdraws, and his hand brushes my skin. I jump, and then he jumps.
My face is level with his shins when he stands; there are wet circles on the knees of his dress pants.
You’re spending a lot of time away from your place, I say. I don’t want you to feel like you have to spend every night here.
He frowns. It doesn’t bother me, he says. I want to help. He vanishes into the hallway.
I sit there until all of the water drains, until the last milky swirl disappears down the silver mouth and I feel a strange shiver that starts deep within me. A spine should not be so afraid. The receding bubbles leave strange white striations on my skin, like the tide-scarred sand at the beach’s edge. I feel heavy.
Weeks pass. The officer who’d taken my statement in the hospital calls to say she might have me come in to identify someone. Her voice is generous, too loud. Later, she leaves a clipped message on the answering machine, telling me it’s not necessary. The wrong person, not the right one.
Maybe he left the state, Paul says.
I stay away from myself. Paul stays away, too. I don’t know who is more afraid, he or I.
We should try something, I say one morning. About this. I gesture to the space in front of me.
He looks up from an egg. Yes, he says.
We lay out suggestions on a hot-pink Post-it note that is too small for many solutions.
I place an order for a DVD from a company that advertises adult films for loving couples. It arrives in a plain brown box, neatly placed on the corner of the cement stoop in front of my apartment. When I pick it up, the box is lighter than I expect. I tuck it under my arm and fiddle with the doorknob for a minute. The new dead-bolt sticks.
I put the box on the kitchen table. Paul calls. I’m coming over soon, he says. His voice always sounds immediate, present, even when he’s speaking over the phone. Did you get the—
Yeah, I say. It’s here.
It will take him at least fifteen minutes to get to this side of town. I go to the box and open it. The number of limbs tangled on the front cover doesn’t appear to match the number of faces. I count, twice, and confirm that there is one extra elbow and one extra leg. I open the case. The disc smells brand-new and doesn’t snap easily from its plastic knob. The shiny side gleams like an oil slick, and reflects my face strangely, as if someone had reached out and smeared it. I set it down in the DVD player’s open tray.
There’s no menu; the movie plays automatically. I kneel down on the carpet in front of the television, lean my chin into my hand, and watch. The camera is steady. The woman on the video looks a little like me—the same mouth, anyway. She is talking shyly to a man on her left, a built man who has probably not always been so—he seems to be straining out of his shirt, which is too small for his new muscles. They are having a conversation, a conversation about—I cannot make out any of the individual pieces of the conversation. He touches her leg. She takes the tab of her zipper and slides it down. There is nothing underneath.
Past the obligatory blow jobs, past the mouth-that-looks-like-mine straining, past perfunctory cunnilingus, they are talking again.
the last time, I told him, I told, fuck, they can see my—
I can’t hold this down, I can’t hold this down, I can’t—
I sit up. Their mouths are not moving. Well, their mouths are moving, but the words dropping from those mouths are expected. Baby. Fuck. Yeah, yeah, yeah. God. Underneath, something else is moving. A stream running beneath the ice. A voiceover. Or, I guess, a voiceunder.
if he tells me again, if he says to me that it’s not okay, I should just—
two more years, maybe, only two, maybe just one if I keep going—
The voices—no, not voices, the sounds, soft and muted and rising and falling in volume—blend together, weave around each other, disparate syllables ringing out. I don’t know where the voices are coming from—a commentary track? Without taking my eyes off the screen, I reach for the remote control and press the pause button.
They freeze. She is staring at him. He is looking somewhere out of the frame. Her hand is pressed down on her abdomen, hard. The swelling knoll of her stomach is vanishing beneath her palm.
I unpause it.
okay, so I had a baby, this isn’t the first time that’s— and if it’s only a year, then maybe I can follow—
I pause it again. The woman is now frozen on her back. Her partner stands between her legs, casually, like he’s about to ask her a question, his cock curved to the left against his abdomen. Her hand is still pushed into her stomach.
I stare at the screen for a long time.
When Paul knocks, I jump.
I let him in and hug him. He is panting and his shirt is damp with sweat. I can taste the salt in my mouth as I press my face against his chest. He kisses me, and I can sense his eyes flicking to the screen.
I feel sick, I tell him.
He asks me if I am soup-sick or Sprite-sick. I tell him soup-sick. He goes into the kitchen and I lie down on the couch.
Jane and Jill have invited us to their housewarming party, he calls from the kitchen. I hear the thunk of the cupboard door striking the cabinet next to it, the dry sliding of cans being sorted through, the sloshing of liquid, the tap of a pot on a burner, the metallic clink of him using the wrong spoon to stir.
They moved? I ask.
To a big house in the country, he says.
I don’t want to go, I tell him, the pale blue light from the television casting shadows on my face as three men intertwine with each other, each mouth full. When he brings the soup out to me, chicken broth brimming precariously at the top of the bowl, napkin resting beneath it, he warns me that it’s hot. I sip the burning soup too quickly and drop a mouthful back into the bowl.
I’m worried that you’re spending too much time in the house, he says. It’ll be mostly women.
What? I say.
At the party. It’ll be mostly women. All people that I know. Good people.
I don’t answer. I touch my numb tongue with my finger.
I wear my turquoise dress with black stockings underneath and take a small aloe plant as a gift. In my car, we speed out of the dim lights of our small town and onto a country road. Paul uses one hand to steer, and rests the other on my leg. The moon is full and illuminates the glittering snow that stretches for miles in every direction, the sloped barn roofs and narrow silos with icicles as thick as my arm hanging from their outcroppings, the herd of rectangular and unmoving cows huddled near the entrance to a hayloft. I hold the plant protectively against my body, and when the car makes a sudden left, some of the
sandy soil spills out onto my dress. I pinch it from the fabric and drop it back into the pot, brushing a few crumbs of dirt off the fleshy leaves. When I look up again, I see that we are approaching a large illuminated building.
So this is a new house? I ask, my head pressed against the window.
Yeah, he says. They just bought it, oh, I don’t know, about a month ago. I haven’t been there yet, but I hear it’s really nice.
We pull up next to a row of parked cars, in front of a renovated turn-of-the-century farmhouse.
It looks so homey, says Paul, stepping out and rubbing his glove-less hands together.
The windows are draped with gauzy curtains, and a creamy honey color throbs from within. The house looks like it’s on fire.
The hosts open the door; they are beautiful and have gleaming teeth. I have seen this before. I have not seen them before.
Jane, says the dark-haired one. Jill, says the redheaded one. And that’s not a joke! They laugh. Paul laughs. It’s so nice to meet you, Jane says to me. I hold the small aloe plant toward her. She smiles again and takes it, her dimples so deep I feel the urge to push my fingers into them. Paul looks pleased, and then leans over and scratches the ears of a large white cat with a smooshed face that is rubbing against his legs.
We’ve made a coatroom out of the bedroom, Jill says. Paul reaches for my coat. I slip it off and hand it to him, and he vanishes up the stairs.
A man in the hallway with buzzed hair and pale skin is holding an ancient camcorder on his shoulder. It is gigantic and the color of tar. He swings it toward me, an eye.
Tell me your name, he says.