Wounds, page 4
And then there were the small accumulations of a normal life: the desk chair with the wheels that stuck; the crumpled, empty bags of potato chips on the floor; the Minnesota Twins mug sitting beside the dormant laptop, still holding an inch of milky coffee, like dirty water at the bottom of a well.
And in the back of the room, nearly hidden by the clutter, was the vat. It was huge, slightly taller and wider than a refrigerator, mounted on an industrial-capacity cooling unit. It was filled with a luminescent green gel. A radio was affixed to the side of the vat with duct tape and twine; a spaghetti snarl of wires trailed from it to the vat’s base, where it disappeared into the side.
This was where the hiss was coming from. It sputtered as you approached. When you stood at your father’s desk—close enough to the vat to caress it, if you had wanted to—the static barked, and a voice, genderless and faint, swam up from the deeps of chaos and noise to speak to you.
“I know you,” I said. This was my time in isolation and darkness––the time before I became “we” again.
Just briefly your face shone with the hard light of hope.
“I know you,” I said again, willing my speech through the long black crush of empty space. “You’re the daughter.”
And you spoke to me, too, for the first time: “Who are you?”
~ ~ ~
I never had a name until your father gave me one. I was a wretch, one imp among a numberless multitude of imps working in the Love Mills on the Eighty-Fourth Declension of Hell. I did not know language until I was pulled here by your father’s sorcery, and learned it after hearing him speak a single word; I did not know of my own individuality until I was peeled from a shared consciousness and from my own body, to be imprisoned as an isolated scrap of thought in that vat; and I did not know love, though my whole existence was bent to its creation, until I saw your father’s expression crumple in despair when he realized that the thing he had plucked from Hell was not the one he had sought.
I knew something had happened to him, though I had no word for death. In the middle of the night I was engulfed by a falling tide of his dreams, thoughts, and memories, which came raining through the ceiling like gouts of ash, as if a volcano were expunging all the dry contents of the earth. It was a bewildering experience, vertiginous and exhilarating—like nothing I had ever known. It did not abate all night and continued even as you came down to the cellar. I could tell immediately that you did not see it or feel it. Your father’s dead brain was geysering, filling the air with all its accumulated freight, and you had no way to apprehend it.
I suppose that could be considered a waste.
“Your father called me ‘Claire,’ when I first arrived,” I told you, each word spitting through the static, and I watched your face make a complicated movement: a mixture of sorrow and hope, which I have learned is part of love’s vocabulary. You retreated to the desk and sat in your father’s chair.
“That’s my mother’s name,” you said.
“I know.”
When you spoke again, your voice sounded strange, as though your throat were being squeezed: “Is that who you are?”
“No.”
You were silent for a long time. The radio on my vat hissed, like rainfall, or like the sound of your father’s spilling brain. You leafed through the pages of a journal he’d kept on the desk. You turned on the computer, but you didn’t know the password to access it. Your search did not seem to be motivated by any real curiosity, though. You seemed stunned by something. Only partially there.
“Where is your father?” I asked you.
You sighed, as if I’d said something tedious. “He’s dead.”
“Oh,” I said, understanding suddenly where the tide of dream ash was coming from. “Is that why you’re upset?”
“I’m not upset.” You looked at me, as if you thought I might challenge you. But I didn’t know how to answer you, Allison. I envied your detachment. I was cast adrift from the rest of me, isolated for the first time. I had never known loneliness. It caused me great pain.
And pain, too, was something new.
How do your kind live like this? How do you not extinguish yourselves from the cold misery of it? How do you know each other at all?
“So, you’re something Dad conjured up? Like a demon or something?”
“I’m not a demon. I’m an imp. I’m a laborer in the Love Mills.”
“What are those?” You didn’t even look at me as you asked these questions. Instead you walked slowly around the lab, tracing your finger across the pictographs or stopping to study one of your own early finger paintings.
“I don’t know how to answer that in a way you can understand.”
“Wow, you sound just like Dad.”
It did not sound like a compliment.
“I want to go home,” I said, hoping to turn this conversation along a more productive course.
You stopped at the dog cages with the children’s names. “What did he do down here? I mean, I know he, like . . . summoned devils or whatever.” You turned to look at me. “Is that what he did?”
“I don’t know what he did before I arrived. I know that he was unhappy to see me.”
“So you were an accident?”
“I think so.”
You nodded and returned to his desk. You opened a manila envelope and a sheaf of photographs spilled out. They were of your mother. They were casual and unposed. Your father looked at them often. Sometimes they made him cry. Sometimes they pushed him into a rage. I couldn’t understand how the same images could provoke such different reactions, and I was curious to see how you would respond. You stared at them for a long time, too, but your expression did not change.
You put them down and said, “My dad’s body is still upstairs. I haven’t called anybody. I guess that’s messed up.”
“Is it?”
“It’s what you’re supposed to do. I’m supposed to cry, too.”
“Why?”
You shrugged. “Because he’s my dad.”
“Then why don’t you?”
“I’m a monster, I guess.”
I didn’t understand this, but it seemed unimportant, so I returned to my own concern. “I want to go home, Allison. I want my body back. I’m lonely here.”
“Well, you can’t,” you said. “I don’t know how to send you home. You’re just going to have to suck it up.”
“That’s not acceptable.”
You stood, calmly and with such poise, and approached the vat. This time you did put your hand on it, and though I should not have been able to, I felt the heat of your blood, the warmth of human proximity. I did not know what it meant, but it shocked me into silence.
“You were meant to be Mom. Did you know? He was trying to bring back Mom, and instead he got you.”
I had nothing to say to that. I remembered his horrified reaction the night he pulled me here, and realized what he had done. It was my first glimpse of love’s face.
“I’m going upstairs,” you said, turning away from me.
I felt a wild and fearful longing. “Don’t leave me here,” I said, my voice lost in the crackle of the radio.
You just kept walking. You turned off the lights as you ascended and left me there, the green light from my vat and my strange liquid form throwing shadows into the dark air. I had never been alone like this. I began to understand that it would last forever.
~ ~ ~
Finally, you came down to us, in Angel’s Rest. The day was overcast and windy; you descended the long road into town, your hair, for once, not obscuring your face but trailing behind you like a dark and unfurled flag. Maybe this unprecedented event should have been enough to let us know that something had gone wrong. But we were creatures caught in our own routine. We were unsuspicious and ignorant. It’s hard to know a miracle for what it is until it blots out the sun with its beauty.
You went to the café in our local bookstore and bought a coffee, ignoring the clerk’s open stare as you gave her your order. Her name was Maggie; she was a senior, three years ahead of you in school and bound for the very university that had driven your father out years ago. Her younger sister was in your computer science class, so she was privy to all the latest rumor and gossip surrounding you. She leaned forward a fraction and sniffed the air, to see if it was true that you didn’t bathe, that you stank of body odor. She couldn’t smell anything but assumed that this was because the jacket you were wearing obscured it. When she took your money, she was careful not to let her fingers touch yours, and she dropped the change onto the counter rather than put it into your hand.
Did you notice these minor insults?
Maggie was so close to leaving our town. If your father had only lived another six or seven months, she would have missed out on everything.
You waited out her shift, and then Joey came in. He saw you sitting there, and he felt a mixture of fear, anger, and excitement. He remembered going to the Devil’s Willow with you earlier in the year, making out with you and wanting to go further but being told no. He remembered the humiliation he felt, the thwarted urge, and remembered too the fear of what people would say if they found out he’d tried to score with the town freak. He hadn’t spoken with you or even looked at you since then. Your sudden presence scared him and excited him all over again.
You ignored Maggie’s hostile stare as she walked away. When Joey was alone behind the counter, you approached him.
“Meet me there tonight,” you said.
Something inside him twisted. He was afraid you were setting him up. Someone like you—an ugly girl, an unwanted girl—had no right. “What are you talking about, skank?” he said.
“You know what I’m talking about. Just be there tonight.”
“I don’t just come when you call. What makes you think you can even talk to me?”
“Whatever. Come or don’t. This is your only chance.”
You left him there. He spent the rest of his shift in a slow-burning rage, because although he was determined not to go, he knew that he would.
The Devil’s Willow grew like a gnarled temple on the far side of the lake. Its brilliant green foliage spilled over and trailed into the water, like a suspended fountain, hiding the bent, blackened wood of the trunk. It got its name from the fact that we believed your father practiced infernal rites there. Some nights we’d see dozens of little candle flames arrayed beside it, or even suspended in the air around it, and there was that one whole week when the entire tree was engulfed in a cold green-white fire. Julie lost her virginity to Thom there last year, and although she never admitted this to anyone, she was afraid that she’d gotten pregnant and that her baby would be born with a goat’s head. When she got her period she cried with relief and terror and her hands shook so badly at school that they sent her home early.
You went there after leaving Joey at the café. Were you planning the night ahead? Were you there for the silence, or were you trying to get closer to the dark energies of your father’s practice? We saw the shape of you as you sat lakeside, your feet dipped into the water, leaning back on your hands like some pale white orchid.
You were always unknowable to us, Allison. We guessed at your motives, at your relationship with your father, and at your reactions to our taunts and provocations. Although we were content to imagine your interior life for all these years, now we want to know the truth. We don’t want to guess at you anymore, Allison.
We want to know if you feel what we do.
~ ~ ~
We know a story of the lake.
There are no stories in the Love Mills. There is no one to tell them, and there is no one to listen; for an imp, there is nothing but the building and maintaining of the mills. It was not until I was pulled to this cold tomb of a world—torn from the plural into the singular—that an idea like “story” was ever introduced to me.
I did not hear it from your father, who did not forgive me for not being his wife. He worked at his various errands in silence. I only learned it after his death, when he sat up there in his study, reclining in his chair like a dead king, his head a volcano of dream ash, a ghostly plume of whatever made him a human being pouring out of him like a long sigh. It was beautiful, Allison, and it’s a tragedy that you couldn’t see it.
The story of the lake was a shower of cinders that fell through me after you left. I don’t know if it’s based on something he read or if it’s something he made up. I don’t even know whether or not he believed it. The story goes that there was once an angel that roamed these hills, in the early days of your kind, long before you had dominion over the world. The angel was a giant to men, a gyre of eyes and wings and talons, stranger and more fearsome than they could withstand. They ran from it in terror. The belief is that it was one of the last of the angels to join the Morningstar’s rebellion. It arrived too late, and the gates of Hell were sealed. An outcast from both kingdoms, it wandered here alone until it could no longer bear the isolation. The angel found a deep lake—this one, Allison; this lake—and went to sleep at its bottom, where it would remain for the rest of time.
I don’t know if the story is true. But I drew comfort from it. It made me less lonely. It’s about the Morningstar, after all, and to hear Him spoken of, even in this secondary way, opened a cascade of beauty inside me. I felt a terrible yearning for my home and my work. It was by that yearning that I knew the Morningstar’s grace was still upon me. The ache of need is a music in Hell.
Your father wondered if this town and everyone in it was just a dream itself, a figment the angel had created to keep itself company. Once I would have laughed at that. I would have told you that if it had wanted companionship, it would not have dreamt creatures such as you.
Now we’re not so sure.
~ ~ ~
You came down to talk to me that night. You cooked yourself a dinner in the microwave and brought it downstairs, where you ate silently at your father’s desk. You left the lights off, sitting in the green luminescence of the vat, listening to the quiet hiss of the radio. You did not acknowledge me at first, but your presence was a lovely surprise, and it went a great distance toward dispelling my loneliness. Though you didn’t know it, it was an act of kindness.
“I like it down here,” you said, once you’d finished. “It’s like being at the bottom of the sea. No wonder Dad spent all his time here.”
“I don’t know what the sea is,” I said.
“It’s basically just like the lake outside, only a lot bigger.”
“How much bigger?”
“It covers most of the world. Don’t you know these things in Hell?”
The notion of a lake large enough to cover the world inspired that sense of yearning again. I didn’t know how I could ache for a place I’d never been. My life had been defined by labor, by hard earth and turning bone and the pink blossoms of smoke rising from our industries, by striations of light across a sky obscured by a rosy curtain of ash. There was no sea. There was no lake. There was no wish for any other place.
It never occurred to me to wonder what it was we labored to create.
“I don’t really know anything about Hell. I was in the Love Mills. That’s all I know.”
You shook your head and nearly smiled. “Trust me. If my dad brought you here? You’re from Hell. That was basically his thing.”
“If you say so.”
You pushed your plate away and took one of your father’s notebooks, leaning back in the chair and paging through it with apparent disinterest. “So did he talk to you about Mom?”
“He didn’t say anything to me.”
“Join the club.” You shook your head, thinking about it. “She wanted to leave us, you know? She didn’t care.” You crossed your arms on the desk and rested your head there, turned away from me. “I guess he really loved her,” you said, and for a long while you didn’t say anything else. I heard you sniff once, and I knew you were crying. I recognized this as another manifestation of love. I was coming to know all of its wonderful facets. The kind you felt was like mine: a wanting that cannot be satisfied. The kind your father felt for your mother was different. It was the kind with hooks.
After a moment you lifted your head and looked at me. “Anyway, I came down here to see what I have to do to flush you out of there. It’s right here in the notebook. I’m not sure what that’ll do to you. Maybe send you back home, maybe kill you. So you might as well go ahead and enjoy your life for a little while longer, because I’m going to go upstairs and get wasted, then come down here and do it.”
I did not know how to receive this information, so I said nothing. The only example I had of death was your own father, whose death seemed to have done little to change him, other than fixing him in place. After all, he still resided in his chair on the floor above us, unfurling his unspent thoughts into the air. The other possibility—being sent back home—was too wonderful to contemplate.
“And then I’m going to do one of Dad’s rituals.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been looking through his notebooks. It doesn’t look too hard. And since he just died, maybe I can get him back. Maybe he’s not too far away yet.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you didn’t care.”
“I don’t.” The tears came back, but you made no move to hide them this time. “I don’t care.”
Even in its absence, love pulled at you with its terrible gravity. Your face was beautiful in anguish. I could see the work of my life there. The house was filled with it, Allison. Love in all its grandeur. What shapes it made of your lives. What shapes it makes, still.
