A Gentle Hell (10 page)

“You’re lying,” he said.
“Really?”

“What’s with all the questions?”

He took my throat in his hand and squeezed gently, not in a sexual way, more like in the way one holds a puppy by the neck to pick her up. When he kissed me I kept my eyes open. When he took the condom out of his pocket I clasped my knees together.

“You’re tense,” he said. “Come here.”

Because I remembered the girl I’d seen years ago in the singing grass on the side of the mountain. Now with the mountain looming over the graves, illuminating the graves, a hazy O-ring of fog splitting the distant meadow into shades of purple haze, I thought those memories might make me never sleep again.

Forget this. I’m not good at describing things like this. I don’t understand why these mechanical motions have to mean anything, how the aesthetics of this particular setting could mean anything. We could’ve been picnicking on the moon, drinking strychnine tea in my grandmother’s
bathtub,
it wouldn’t have made a damn difference.

He told me once that love was a temporary chemical imbalance. That love turns into hate. Not that any of that is profound, so instead of talking, let’s rewrite every love scene in every cheap paperback ever written,
turn
it into a chemistry lesson so we can watch the violent reactions underneath a sterile glass slide. It won’t be difficult to do.

At the end of it all I lay in the dirt underneath the tree of life with my dress hiked up over my hips and condom thrown onto the ground. And still a virgin. I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” he asked me.

“No reason,” I said.

He cocked his head, raised one eyebrow.

“I lost my nerve,” he said.

After that he drove me out of the cemetery and to my home in town. He hugged me like we were chaste, which, I suppose we still were. He took a cigarette out of his jacket pocket.
Lit it.

“I’ll see you later,” he said, voice scratched with smoke.

I didn’t go home that night.

Instead, when he drove me away I went back to the meadow, past the woods and the spring, to the edge of the singing grass that I hadn’t been to since I was a child. It was just as I remembered. The O-ring around the mountain dissipated, and the side of the sheer rock reached down toward the meadow like a drinking crane.

Don’t ask me why I came back. The answer wouldn’t satisfy you. Just know that someone must’ve seen it coming, because the place had been prepared for me.

On the edge of the singing grass sat an upholstered chair from my living room.
And next to the chair, my floor lamp.

If I didn’t know what I was doing as a writer I would say, “as if in a dream.” Because that’s what writers say when they don’t want to take the time to explain things in a logical way, or they’ve forgotten the reason why. But sometimes, in real life, there is no causal explanation for the actions that we take. And so, as if in a dream I crossed to the edge of the grass and I sat down in my chair.

When I turned on the lamp, though there was no way it should’ve turned on, the deer grazing in the middle of the singing grass looked up at me. Her eyes gleamed in the light. Behind her I saw the shape of the cougar, almost amorphous, crouching in the grass.

This time I didn’t
look
 
away
from what was about to happen. Blame the intoxication, the particulars of the circumstance, the moonlight striking the grass just so like the bad mood lighting for a budget horror movie. I tensed in my chair and dug my nails into the arms until they bent, but I didn’t run.

When the cougar pounced, the deer turned around and struck him. He hit the grass, stunned, and she bent down and ripped out his heart.

The deer glanced up at me, saw me looking at her, and fled.

I crawled through the grass as it keened. I knelt in front of the body of the cougar and watched its heart, still quivering, lit by my lamp that had somehow ended up on the side of a mountain. I tasted its pulse on the tip of my tongue.

My hands shook as I reached out for the heart. It was warm and textured like a tongue, and as I cupped it in my palms it spit out the last of its convulsions and lay still. I brought the heart to my mouth and drew a deep breath. Its viscous, copper smell touched the back of my throat.

I ate the heart.

I think that’s when I realized this was never my story.

One day out in the meadow he started to paint her. Even before her outline took shape on the canvas, I knew he was painting her. I could tell by the colors he mixed. That snake green.
Moth brown.
The sick gray of her skin. I watched from the trees, my usual hiding place. My chair and lamp had disappeared from the meadow long ago, to be replaced by the artist and his accouterments. The grass shifted its song when he worked here, no longer a keen but a hollow rustle. It drank him in and waited for the time when it could spit him back out.

“What are you working on?” I asked him one night. I’d go over to his house most nights, climb through his open window and onto his bed. I told him at first it was so my boyfriend, who was one of his friends, wouldn’t catch me here. But we broke up soon enough and I still went through the same routine. In truth, I just liked climbing through the window.

Instead of responding, he asked me, “have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?”

“What?” I asked him.

“Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked me.

“Yeah,” I said, “you put a cat in a box and it’s dead and alive at the same time.

Schrödinger’s cat.”

“Quantum entanglement.
Two particles can have a relationship even when they’re separated by miles.
Even time.
Change the state of one particle, and the other one knows what’s happening.”

“So you could use quantum entanglement to time travel?”

“Sort of,” he said, “yes.
But maybe not in the way that you know it.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He lapsed into silence, outstretched one of his arms so that I could huddle close. He did that often; would go quiet if I asked about the underlying fundamentals of a thing, or would talk about something completely unrelated. That’s what happens when you forgetting you’re writing a story and you think you’re going to be profound. You ask questions trying to get to the center, like the answer will lead you to some ultimate revelation, the perfect Platonic form.

If there was anything important I learned it was this: he taught me how to see a thing for what it is and not what I thought it represented. Not every atom has to be torn apart to get to its nucleus. Not every fact or idea has to be labeled and put in a schema. No, here is the earth that I’m gripping between my fingers. Here is the heart I’m chewing apart. Here is the rattlesnake tied to my wrist and the sharp pain that follows.

Here is the tornado, god of entropy, tearing the house apart, and all I can think is that he looks sexy when he’s bent over a broken mirror snorting MDMA through a dollar bill. Everything else is extraneous.

He painted her in profile, with the snakes in her hair writhing as if they were still alive. Her Morpheus eyes became empty slaughterhouses that caved inside her head and then collapsed. The moths sewn onto her dress turned into little children.

It should’ve ended there, but of course it didn’t.

He elongated the bones of her face and stretched out her skin. He gave her a muzzle and a cold black nose tipped with white and a thin line of a mouth. He painted her skin taut and brown and dull. Her dress melded into her bones and on her back he painted spots of white.
   

Then he ringed her mouth with a rusted red.

On the nights when he couldn’t sleep sometimes he crawled onto the bed and leaned over me while I slept. Then he watched, waiting for me to wake up and see him. He touched my face then with both hands, his face stoic.

“What’s wrong?” I asked him.

“Nothing’s wrong,” he said, “just go back to sleep.”

I felt the cougar heart in my stomach about to spill out my mouth and nose. It had stayed a part of me all the while, chewed up but indigestible, keening inside of me like the singing grass. I turned my head away and his hands fell. I went to sleep dreaming of being eaten alive.

When he was almost finished with the painting I went back to the singing grass alone one night. She watched me as I walked, I knew she did, like a barefooted changeling from the trees with her hair bending down to flay me.

This time all the furniture from my house waited out on the singing grass.
Everything except the walls.
There were chairs, bed, shower and sink, the refrigerator, the living room television, the desk from the hallway corner, all of it strewn out in the meadow.

The formaldehyde jar of black arms lay on my bed. It was my bed, there was no doubt, there were the chipped white bedposts, that was the cover I hadn’t replaced in seven-odd years, with its ridiculous pink flowers and faded gray corners.

“What is this place?” I said out loud, knowing she was nearby.

No response. The wind whipped through the grass, and the grass howled.

I approached the black arms, expecting them to jump to life in their shroud of formaldehyde. But they remained still, floating in suspension. I reached out and touched the slick jar.

The girl grasped my hand from behind. I jerked my hand away from the jar and whirled around. She stood there, head cocked, a half-smile on her face. The snake skins hung from her hair sung like the grass. In one hand she held a shovel.

“What is this place?” I asked. “And why is all my furniture here?” My voice sounded odd to me, like it was coming up from the ground at my feet instead of my throat.

“I’ve assembled everything here. Everything you wanted to lose but couldn’t.”

“Stop being enigmatic,” I said.

“Am I?” she asked. “Listen. He’ll be here soon. You have to start digging.”

“What?”

She held the shovel out to me. Reflexively, I reached out to take it.
Grasped the handle.
Behind me the black arms stirred. My spine kicked, but I didn’t want to turn around to look.

“You’re still a virgin, aren’t you?” she asked.

“What does that matter?”

“Dig,” she said, “or I’ll tear your heart out.”

She smiled to show me her bloodstained, blunt-cut teeth, and then she turned around and disappeared behind the
treeline
.

The incident in the singing grass was just one of those things that happened to everyone, wasn’t it? But as I set the shovel to the grass in front of my bureau and started to dig, I knew that wasn’t true. If I wasn’t a writer I wouldn’t have come up here with my journal and pen to write down those useless things, or trained myself to see the details in my surroundings. If he wasn’t an artist, critical, detail-oriented, maybe he would’ve believed my story and stayed away. Or even if he did think I was a liar, he wouldn't have come up here to paint.

As my hands started to sting from gripping the handle and the sweat welded my hair to my forehead, I thought of him. He was in his room asleep now, most likely, or rebounding off the walls with insomniac mania as the unfinished painting of the girl stored in the corner of the house ballooned in his periphery. Maybe he was reading about astronomy, the thousand different ways to cross the universe, getting drunk and talking about physics to strangers.
Anything but walking up to the singing grass, crossing the singing grass, meeting the eyes of the girl who sprung out of the dirt.
Please be anywhere but here, because I couldn’t handle him falling apart with me.