Eleven Twenty-Three, page 27
The three of us run inside and down the hall to Tara’s bedroom. At first, Tara blocks our view, standing in the doorway with her hands wrapped around her mouth. She coughs and gags before retreating to the bathroom.
“Oh my god,” Julie stammers. “Oh my god.”
The first thing I notice is the knife Hajime pulled earlier, now discarded into the middle of a large pool of blood. A couple of feet away, Chloe is bundled up in a fetal position, her arms sliced open with much more deliberation and anxiety than her father’s were. But she’s still just as dead.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Hajime says, his body noticeably shaking and his breath coming out in spastic bursts. “So it’s not happening at only eleven twenty-three anymore?”
“No, it still is,” I mutter. “Chloe did this to herself.”
No one speaks for a long time. In the bathroom, Tara is sucking in sobs, repeating the phrase “Chloe’s okay” over and over to herself, but to no avail. Her older sister does not move. Tara is completely alone. Her entire family is past-tense.
“We’re going to have to move her,” Julie whispers. “We can’t just leave her here.”
“Where do we move her to?” I whisper back. “The curbside so she can be picked up, thrown into the back of a truck, and cremated somewhere tomorrow morning? That’s a bit much, isn’t it?”
“So what else are we going to do with her, Layne? We don’t have time to bury her right now. In an hour or so, this could be us.”
“Let’s move her to Miranda’s room,” Hajime says. “Whoever’s left at eleven thirty-five can deal with it.”
In an effort to save ourselves, we’re losing everything worth saving.
We move the corpse, which is just now getting cold, into Miranda’s room. Julie has to pick the lock first. While Hajime and I stand there holding Chloe by the armpits and legs, blood seeps out of the chasms in her wrists and builds into a small puddle on the floor. I have to drag the briefcase through it when we carry Chloe into the bedroom. Hajime and I gently place the body on the bed, which is already stained from when Miranda hacked herself up. I close the door behind me and run to the kitchen sink, soaking my arms and the case in hot water. The water that cascades down the drain is the color of old wine.
PARENTHESIS
Like a tiny precocious princess, Tara never lets go of a question once she has asked it. This has always been both her most engaging and infuriating character trait. Like her campaign for a free Burma or continuing struggle to bind the two of us in matrimony, Tara has always asked the biggest questions with the largest question marks at the end, and nine times out of ten will provide her own definitive answers within minutes of posing them.
It’s occurred to me just how devastating the Lilly’s End phenomenon must be to her psyche. The entire ordeal is a question she did not ask and, worst of all, seems less and less likely to ever present her with an answer. There’s no real reason for her sister to have committed suicide, or for her parents to have died the way they did. She’s never going to receive a long-winded explanation of why Lilly’s End no longer exists from an apologetic man in a business suit. Further, I have no acceptable excuse for being unfaithful to Tara last summer, but it happened regardless. Tara does not understand concepts like these.
We met in the fog one early morning just under three years ago. It was my last week of school before winter break, but I had started my vacation early and placed my classroom duties on drunken automatic pilot. The past two days, I had been up until the wee hours of the morning, hanging out with Hajime, wandering the End, getting stoned, and mindlessly looking up articles on the Toa Payoh ritual murders and DMT on Wikipedia. At work, I had reduced myself to a permanent sleepwalking daze. Oddly enough, no one seemed to notice.
I had gotten into the habit of stopping by the local Starbucks before heading to Kennedy High School, and that Wednesday before break was no different. The location at the corner of Monroe and Kentucky was the first of what became three, even in a beach town with a lower population than a third-world village.
When I got to the café, it was still dark outside and the ground lay obscured in fog. There were hazy orange streetlights floating above the mist, giving the entire scene the appearance of a student film dream sequence. My eyes were half-closed. I fumbled in my pocket for car keys and thought that perhaps I should have had the girl behind the counter pour another shot of espresso into my latte. It was going to be a long day and another all-too-short night.
That’s when I heard the loud plop of a notebook on the ground behind me, along with the most touching uttering of the phrase “son of a bitch” I’d ever encountered.
All I saw at first was the hair, which was blond with brunette highlights then. After that it was the shoulders, the supple chest, the hourglass midriff, and legs obscured by baggy pajama pants. It was too early for rejection, I decided, and knelt down to help the girl pick up the other two spiral notebooks and the pocket-sized guide to MLA format. As I was kneeling, she assured me that this was “not necessary, just very nice of you.” I could smell the detergent soaked into the fabric of the old blood donor t-shirt she was wearing. The pattern on her black-and-white pajamas made me dizzy. I glimpsed the toe ring she was wearing and noted the decimated-forest-green nail polish on her fingers. I could tell by her nervous demeanor and scent that she was chewing gum to keep from smoking.
“Long night?” I asked, trying to make eye contact, but her face remained obscured behind notebooks, stray bits of sleepy hair, and a pair of reading glasses.
“Just don’t ask me anything about the marriage customs of indigenous peoples in Namibia and we’ll get along just fine,” she sighed. “I’ve just spent the entire night writing a paper on the subject and right now I’m kind of just wishing the Owambo would fall victim to freedom fighters or something.”
“That’s too bad, because I’ve been interested in the Owambo for a while and thought I finally lucked out by meeting you. I thought this might be my morning.”
“You can read my paper if you want. But fair warning: there may be typos. Red Bull wrote it, not me.”
“Typos? Oh, well forget it,” I said, flashing a grin. “To be honest, I’d much rather just hear it from you.”
I was already obsessed.
The girl looked up with exhausted bemusement. Her glasses obscured sleepy infatuated eyes and lips permanently curved into a slight smirk that made one feel adored one moment and ridiculed the next.
“Not bad,” she said, making no attempt to obscure her inspection of me. “All you have to do now is buy me my coffee and you’re in like flint, Mister…”
“Prescott,” I said, inconspicuously glancing at my watch. “Layne Prescott.”
“Tara Tennille,” she said, extending a hand that felt like three years of future when I shook it.
I bought her a cup of coffee and was in my classroom flipping on the lights only four minutes before first block showed up that morning. I didn’t teach much of anything the day I met Tara, and added five points to all of my senior mid-term exams based on a suggestion my strange new girl made while sipping tentatively from a mocha cappuccino.
I repeated her first name to myself throughout the morning, noting its non-association to the word “terra,” which I found disappointing. Later I found out by doing a quick search online that the entomology of the name Tara was actually Sanskrit for “shining” and Kurdish for “star,” though I doubted she knew either of these things.
Three days and two exhausting phone conversations later, on the eighteenth of December, we went on our first date. It was in Orlando doing…something. I don’t remember exactly. Aside from the sights of China, everything outside Lilly’s End has always been a blur to me, including much of my subsequent life with Tara. There was a dinner somewhere that looked like a rainforest. It was cold and our breath steamed. We held hands and stared at huge Lego sculptures. A constant stream of girls on their way to some club judged us in their passing, and they seemed to approve. Tara ran into a friend of hers from class in front of an almost-empty Irish restaurant. A boat full of silent tourists slid by and Tara lit a cigarette. I had a drag of hers. A man who didn’t look like he worked there asked to take a picture of us and we let him. When I finished a Coke and tossed the empty cup into a trash bin, I saw a gas mask stuffed down into the garbage bag.
At the end of the night, we drove back to the End and she kissed me in the parking lot of the Starbucks where we met. There were stars above our head, glimmering as faintly as exorcised spirits. Tara pointed up at them and whispered, “That’s us.” I was freezing but happy and wouldn’t let go of her hand until I dropped her off at her dorm.
I secretly decided that night that the world was a magical place and chance encounters did not really exist, that no truly important event was ever left to coincidence. It was no accident that I met Tara that morning, just like it was no accident three years and thousands of miles later when I met a man named Mr. Scott in a crowded airport bar.
It didn’t take long to fall in love with someone like Tara. She was a beautiful and engaging woman, an obvious fan of home hair coloring kits, and adept at conversations on things that “mattered.” This was quite different from the kind of girls I was used to dating and occasionally sleeping with before I met her. I decided right away that a life with Tara meant irreversible evolution on my part. With this one, there would be no more dining in franchise restaurants. No more summer blockbuster films. I’d be eating less red meat. I’d have to start caring about things deemed important and would have to feign sympathy for bulimics and children with Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome. No more jokes with a punch line involving the acronym PETA. I’d have to put a halt to the almost constant stream of insults and condemnations I made concerning my family and students. I would be required to train myself to look at the world without grimacing.
But it was all worth it, I assured myself. Tara was original, gorgeous, crazy about me, and wholly dedicated to making the world a better place. I was entranced, and admired her passion despite the fact that I did not share it.
It turned out that my new girlfriend came with quite a résumé. In high school, Tara Madison Tennille was the vice-president of the National Honor Society and an active member in the Latin Club and FBLA. She had the tenth highest GPA in her graduating class. Not many of her classmates were aware that the spoiled floozy, the one with the blond hair and the less-than-savory reputation that graduated a couple of years prior, was Tara’s older sister, and Tara was happy to keep it that way. The day she graduated, a lot of people clapped and Chloe exchanged numbers with a guy she hadn’t seen since the time they had sex in an orange grove.
Once she was in college, Tara briefly contributed vocals to a pop punk band that included two guitarists from Korea and a Romanian drummer before quitting that and getting involved with the atheists and existential humanitarians who hung outside of Cooper Hall instead. She was friends with most of the other girls in her dorm. On Saturdays, she enjoyed going down to the beach by the lighthouse to watch members of the local art course paint the same horizon a dozen different ways. She would wear expensive pajamas and the most carefully messy ponytail imaginable to her earlier classes just to prove she didn’t care about outward appearance.
Everything that Tara did fit this mold, now that I think about it. The more impulsive and poorly managed she tried to be, the more carefully orchestrated and carried out it became. Even her “spontaneous” decision to join me in China a few months ago could not have been more researched, scrutinized, and planned on her part.
Before that foggy morning outside the coffee shop, Tara briefly dated two overweight engineering majors and a bisexual DJ just to show the world that she put no barriers on love, though in the end she fell for a guy with an almost identical socio-economic background to her own in a manner that would have surprised no one.
Every time someone would question Tara’s bizarre life decisions, her catch-all (and sometimes insufficient) response was “Well, I’m a psychology major, after all.”
But I always thought Tara enjoyed the idea of being a psychology major more than she would ever enjoy the actual practice of it, just like she was more infatuated with the concept of being a humanitarian than with making true life-risking humanitarian efforts. She could stand on orange vermillion bridges and spout off morbid statistics and anecdotes about dead people’s last moments for hours, but never took much interest in talking to a would-be jumper in an effort to stop them from becoming another bridge story. She’d send dozens of e-mails to everyone she knew with links to a whole cache of websites dedicated to liberating the peoples of various despicable countries across the globe, and yet if presented with an opportunity to distribute food and medicine to villagers somewhere in the Irrawaddy Delta, would quickly pass and send in a donation instead. Tara’s always preferred to remain the messenger of awareness for every crappy thing that’s ever happened rather than working to stop any of the crappy things from happening in the first place.
This is not so terrible a position, however. Hajime would simply slather a canvas with red, black, and gray paint and bring it up during a bout of drinking to make the same statement. Hajime has always used his own myriad causes as the center of intellectual one-ups known only to him, while Tara simply hides behind hers in an effort to never admit that the world is truly a bad place and that she is, in the end, deathly afraid of it. Further, things do not improve no matter how much one rants and raves and sends in scant checks for twenty-five dollars to UNICEF.
For the first two years, things were mostly fine between us. I helped her with papers, she helped me grade mine, and I made a point to take her with me to every function my school held to ward off any suspicions from my administrators that I was anything other than a clean-cut, all-American liberal guy with no interest in radical politics or experimental drug use. She met my mother and nodded to everything she said, made excuses for my absence every time my father called, and never once blamed any of my more selfish actions on the fact that I was an only child. We talked about politics and the trends of technology. We handed out flyers for an organization working to stop famine in North Korea. There was angry talk about fossil fuels. We discussed where we were when the Twin Towers fell (oddly enough, both of us were in a doctor’s office, and we were getting good news that day). We stared into each other’s eyes and never flinched once.
She seemed as close to perfection as I could ever meet in front of a franchise coffee shop.
We moved in together her senior year of college, had sex at odd times of the day, and ate bowls of Corn Pops late at night while watching The Colbert Report. There were stuffed animals thrown around my bedroom that seemed to spontaneously reproduce while I was off at work. Tara vacuumed obsessively, unable to get a stain out of the carpet that I never could see when she pointed down at it in disgust. She cooked flavorless meals in the kitchen and insisted that we not dine out more than once a week. She liked to spend Sundays naked in bed, perfecting her Sudoku skills and sipping from glasses of organic orange juice.
But the quiet times no one notices, the little pauses in the steady stream of relationship chatter, grew longer and longer, and I began to notice them. One night I involuntarily fantasized about my voluptuous female boss at school, Ms. Chinaski, and another night I had a nightmare where every time I tried to speak, Tara literally ate my words before they could foster any sort of meaning. Worst of all, when Tara visualized marriage, she thought of Christmas trees and polished dinner tables, front porches and worthy causes, inside jokes and our withered old hands one day clutching each other after a lifetime of unfathomable happiness and fulfillment. When I attempted to picture the same institution, I saw nothing more than overpriced hookers and hotel rooms that looked too much like hotel rooms, days of silence and weeks of arguing, empty beer bottles and ruined make-up. I saw a nineteenth century expressionist painting. I saw my mother and father.
Then there was my week-long indiscretion with Mitsuko, a source of endless guilt and diarrhea thereafter, but never the impetus for a confession.
Even before the Mitsuko debacle, in February of this year, Tara and I had a twelve-hour argument one night that erupted over nothing more than a disagreement about the difference between bipolar disorder and manic-depression, and we almost broke up. By sunrise the next morning, the alarm clock was smashed on the bedroom floor, an empty milk jug had been tossed into the bathroom sink, and I had asked her to move her things out.
She made it clear to me that the moment she removed the last piece of her furniture from my home, we were through. I held my ground and asked her not to forget the stuffed animals.
It was not long after our epic-length break-up session that Tara sat down with her old dorm-mate Julie and a worrisome mutual friend from their bank named Miranda to sketch out a plan to rent a cute little yellow house on 5813 Flint Street. When Miranda asked if Layne would be around much if the girls moved in together, Tara responded, “Not at all. Layne and I will never see another December together again, I don’t think.”
“Oh no,” Julie said. “Really? I like Layne.”
Miranda lifted her coffee mug to conceal the fact that she was absolutely beaming.
“Then again,” Tara said, “what if we did?”
And Tara never let go of a question once she had asked it.
11:18:21 PM
At the house on Flint Street, things are falling apart. As the next wave of hysteria spirals toward us, our spirits are crushed, our tempers are flared, and I feel like something terrible is approaching—something that has nothing to do with time and yet everything to do with the past.
