Fearful Symmetries (32 page)

Apparently, a side effect of apex prowess is peckishness. The Glenn Highway spreads before me, a glistening buffet table strung with cozy sodium lights for mood.

Whatever manipulates me is not traveling of its own volition so much as being pulled as a steel filing by the mother of all magnets. The delays and digressions are but zigzag deviations of a neutron star as it’s dragged into a black hole.

In any event, I zig through a rest stop near Eagle River and am compelled to annihilate the dozen or so inhabitants. Well, I
say
compelled—it’s not as if I require much arm-twisting.

I wrench doors from semi-trucks, and peel the roofs off compact cars. I am a beast cracking oyster shells. My need is overwhelming, my appetite is profound. I lick eyes from sockets, then the brains, the guts, the cracked-from-the-bone marrow, and even swallow a few bones whole. I expand and contract, I divide and reform. I squirm and slash. I am a pit that is everywhere. Light bends around me, or it is consumed.

A handful of survivors flee into the dour Plexiglas and cement octagon with a stylized eagle blazoned on the sloped roof. My reflection warps against the glass, or perhaps warps the glass itself. A cockscomb of jagged flint erupts from the sundered dome of my cranium. Spurs of razor-tipped basalt extrude from my wrists, elbows, and knees. Even as I take in its ghastly splendor, my physiognomy alters and is transfigured into something far worse, something that overwhelms my capacity to articulate its awfulness.

I am resplendently dire. I am a figure of awe. I am a horror.

They barricade the entrance with soda machines and that delays me for a few seconds once I finish outside. I find them cowering and gibbering prayers under Formica tables and in bathroom stalls. Somebody stabs me with a hunting knife, somebody else plugs me with a small caliber handgun. Six or seven teeny popgun flashes in the dark among the roaring and screaming. It hardly matters.

Toward the end, I flop, maw agape, on the concrete floor at the end of the demolished gallery and let that sweet hot stream of blood and viscera roll down my gullet. Overhead, the lights flicker crazily and shadows rip themselves apart.

When it’s finished, I shamble forth from the despoiled building. Pasted in gore and excrement, crowned by a garland of intestines, I strike a Jesus Christ pose in the center of the highway.

Traffic routes around me, makes me consider the legend of the stampeding buffalo herd breaking around a man if he remains motionless and tall in his boots. The sun arcs across the sky four times, and so swiftly it sheds tracers of flame. A green-gold ball of bubbling gas, a bacterium in division. The amoeba sun segments in rhythm with my own squamous brain cells. The sun strobes and vanishes. The sliver moon swings down and sinks into my breast, cold as a fang of ice. That which nests within my DNA blooms and reticulates as it rewrites parameters of operation.

The city awaits.

I project myself forward along a corridor of alternating light and darkness, contract through a crimson doorway, and into a dance hall. My need to gorge is satiated and replaced by an urge I don’t recognize. A wormhole opens behind my left eye. The void shivers and yearns; it lusts for sensation.

Music dies as the DJ apprehends me with his bemused gaze. Then the dancing. All heads turn toward my dreadful countenance.

What happens at the Gold Digger Saloon. I cannot speak of it. The ecstasy is the sun going nova in my brain. Nova, then collapsing inward, a snow crystal flaking, disintegrating, and then nothing left except a point of darkness, the wormy head of a black strand that bores its way to the core of everything.

We aren’t rich. The pool house is our compromise—as long as Ferris didn’t push for a mother-in-law cottage, I’d see she had herself a full-length heated pool to do laps. Ferris was on the swim team in high school and college and she’s tried valiantly to maintain her form. The YMCA is a no go. Too many sluggish old people in the lane, too many screaming kids, too many creepy dudes in the bleachers. Thus, the pool house. A gesture of defiance in the face of brutal Alaska winters.

I enter through the skylight. A long dead star field turns and burns over my shoulder. The coals that were stars sigh.

Ferris lies naked and icy pale against the dappled green water. Her eyes are closed. Occasionally her arms and legs scissor languidly. Beneath her, is her seal shadow and the white tile that slopes away into haziness. Vapors shift across her body and carry its scent to me, sharp and clean amid the faint tang of chlorine. She daydreams on the cusp of sleep and I taste the procession of phantoms that illuminate her inner landscape. Mine is not among them.

I descend as if a great spider on its wire, then stop and hang in place. This thing that has hijacked and reconstituted my body, reduced my consciousness and placed it in a bell jar, is drawn to her. More specifically, that which I have become is drawn to something
within
her. I don’t comprehend the intricacies. I can only bear mute witness to the spectacle as it unfolds.

A black spot stains at the bottom of the pool. The spot spreads across the white bed, a ring of darkness widening as pieces of tile crumble into the depths. It is a pit, slackening directly below my lovely, frigid wife. My betrayer wife, my arm extending, my claw, hollow as a siphon, its shadow upon her betrayer’s face, and the abyssal trench an iris beneath. Wife, come along to Kingdom Come, come to the underworld.

Her eyes snap open.

“I didn’t fuck him,” she says. “I fantasized about it, plenty.”

Monroe is absent from the scene, and that’s a shame. Every pore in me longs to drink his blood, to liquefy him, fry him, to have his heart in my fist. To ram his heart down her throat.

“I didn’t fuck him. Elmer, I didn’t. I should’ve.”

Her blood. His blood. Their atoms.

I open my mouth (maw) to accuse, to excoriate, and the dead song of the dead stars worms out. But she doesn’t blink, she repeats that she hasn’t fucked him, hasn’t fucked him. She projects her innocence in an electromagnetic cone meant to kill. She is entirely too composed, this fragile sack of skin and water.

She says, “Are you here to hurt me, Elmer?” Her smile is pitiless, it cuts. “The time you came home drunk and forced me? There’s a word for you, hon. Don’t you remember what you’ve done?”

I don’t remember. I seethe.

Difficult to concentrate through the interference of her thoughts that explain via pointillism how Monroe opportunistically slaughtered me and then so much like the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” had succumbed to guilt and paranoia and eventually fled the country. The FBI hunts him in connection with my disappearance. He could be anywhere. She suspects Mexico. Monroe always had a romanticized notion about Mexico and what he could do there, a super gringo lover man.

The little shit swallowed her teary stories of my cruelty and violence. He’d done me in as an act of vengeance. An act that only earned Ferris’s contempt. She is utterly my creature and let no man cast asunder what all the powers above and below had seen fit to forge.

I convulse with a complicated longing and snatch for her. She’s too quick. She rolls, sleek and white, and flashes downward amid a cloud of bubbles into the pit. Fool that I am, I follow.

We meet in darkness, each illuminated by a weak spotlight that dims and brightens with our breathing. I sense immense coldness and space pressing against the bubble where we reside. I am whole. My cloven skull and rotting flesh are restored. My mind is papered over with gold star stickers and crepe.

She points an automatic pistol at me. I understand that it’s a present from her would-be lover. The barrel aligns with my eye. I have traveled through the barrel and been deposited in this limbo.

“I warned him. Told him he’d never succeed. If I couldn’t kill you, then there was no hope for him.” She laughs and shakes the wet hair from her eyes. “Arsenic in your coffee every day for three months. Nothing. For God’s sake, I frosted your birthday cake with rat poison.”

Now that she mentions it, now that her thoughts bleed into mine, I recall the bitter coffee, the odd aftertaste of the icing on my last cake. A skull and crossbones has hung over our marriage for years. Yet, I remain. What does it mean?

“I hurt you, but I couldn’t kill you. Monroe couldn’t. Nobody can. You died in childhood. Maybe you were never born. Maybe the parasite that fruits your corpse is the only true part of you that existed.”

Am I merely a figment? If so, I am the most rapacious, carnivorous, and vengeful figment she will have the misfortune to encounter. I strike aside the gun and reach for her. A black halo of light manifests around Ferris. Her arms spread wide and she becomes the very figure of a dread and terrible insect queen. The enormity of her eclipses my own.

She clutches me and the sting slides in. “It was always here, love. In all of us, always.”

It’s apparent that I’ve miscalculated again.

Reality has bent and bent. I look past the nimbus of black flame into her cold eyes. Reality just goes right ahead and comes apart.

Darkness rolls back to daylight. It’s spring and balmy. The breeze is redolent with sweet green sap and the bloom of roses. Guests and children of the guests clutter a lawn that’s too bright and too green to be real. “Death to Everyone” by good old Will Oldham crackles over the speakers. I’m stuffed into a poorly fitted tux. At my side, Ferris shines as radiantly white as the Queen of Winter.

I have seen this, relived this, in a thousand-thousand nightmares.

My hand overlaps hers as we saw the blade into that multi-tiered cake. She opens her mouth and bites through the icing, the bunting, and my brittle soul. I shudder and kiss her. It feels no different than kissing ice bobbed up from the bottom of an arctic lake. She inhales my heat and my vitality before I can inhale hers. She’s always been stronger, in the only way that counts. She always will be stronger.

Oldham’s voice fades and the guests stare at us in hushed expectation.

Nearby, a little girl in a black funeral dress begins to sing the “Hearse Song” to the boy she’s tormenting with malice or affection, take your pick:

“They put you in a big black box

And cover you up with dirt and rocks.

All goes well for about a week,

Then your coffin begins to leak.

The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out,

The worms play pinochle in your snout,

They eat your eyes, they eat your nose,

They eat the jelly between your toes.”

This time around, I do what I should’ve in the first place all those lost years ago. Instead of cutting a piece for the first guest in line, I grip the knife and slice my throat. Blood fans the cake and Ferris’s white dress. She throws back her head and laughs. I sink to my knees in the thirsty grass. The sun pales and contracts to a black-limned ring. Red shadows pour through the trees, drench the lawn, and reduce the paralyzed spectators to negatives. I try to speak. Worms crawl out.

Ferris’s parents loved me. I first met them during Thanksgiving when she and I stayed over at the family casa—Ferris slept in her old room with the Prince poster and a mountain of heart-shaped pillows and teddy bears while I bunked in the basement on a leather sofa between her old man’s pool table and a gun safe.

There was a tense moment when she removed her shades and revealed the Lichtenburg flower of a purple knot under her eye. Ferris was so very smooth. She spun a story about getting kicked in the face during swim practice, and her family bought it. She wasn’t speaking to
me
except as required, probably hadn’t even decided whether to stay with me or toss her engagement ring into the trash.

Hell of it was, at that early stage in our romance I didn’t care much either way.

Turkey, gravy, pumpkin pie, and afterward, a quart of Jim Beam passed around a circle of a half-dozen of Ferris’s menfolk. Salt of the earth bumpkins who raised coon dogs and revved the engines on four-wheelers at the gravel pit and picked through piles at the dump for fun.

You like John Wayne? one truck-driving uncle wanted to know. Shore as hail, I love the Duke! And with that, I was in like Flynn. My lumberjack beard, plaid coat, and knowledge of professional football didn’t go amiss, either.

Her dad welcomed me to the family with teary eyes and a bear hug. I wasn’t “nothin’ like them pussies she usually brings home from college.” How right my future in-law hillbillies were! Not three days before that Clampett-style feast I’d beaten a UAA fraternity brother within an inch of his life for giving me the stink eye as I staggered home from the Gold Digger Saloon. I made the letter-sweater-wearing jock try to eat a parking meter. The whole time Ferris’s family exchanged jocular crudities at the supper table, my hand was in my pocket, caressing the frat boy’s braces, with a few teeth still stuck in them, like a God-fearing Catholic fondling his rosary. It was the only thing that kept me from stabbing one of those bozos with a steak knife.

I gave the lot of those silly, inbred bastards my best aw-shucks grin, and daydreamed about how lovely and charred their slack-jawed skulls would shine from the cinders of a three
A.M.
house fire.

Aided by booze and a vivid imagination, I survived dinner and into the following day. Driving home, the stars were blacked. Snow fell like a sonofabitch. Every now and again the tires slipped against ice and the truck shook. Dad’s ghost muttered in my ear. My heart knocked and I forgot to blink for at least forty miles. The high beams carved a tunnel into the blizzard. Patsy Cline came on the radio out of Anchorage. Patsy sang “Crazy” and that was our song, all right.

Ferris reached across the gulf from the passenger side and held my hand. Her fingers clamped cold and tight over mine. In the rearview there was nothing but darkness, snowflakes endlessly collapsing in our wake, and a black slick of road painted red in the taillights’ glow.

Most of Micah’s funeral is a merciful blur now, a hundred odd moments of my life gone and good riddance. But not all of it.

I remember the startled looks I got, walking into the Church of the Risen alone for the first time.

Old Maisie Langan bleating, “What’s
she
doing here?” and Davena Simon hissing back, “Hush! She doesn’t know any better.”

I remember wondering where they thought I should be, if not at the funeral for my husband and his parents, who’d burned in the car with him.

But valley people don’t use the word
funeral
. The service is called
acknowledgement of death.
I never understood all the local expressions, any more than I understood why Pastor Vance read from The Book of Corinthians at every service. I remember him droning on about our Lord rising from the darkness on the third day, and how we awake to righteousness, and come forth in perfection.

I remember praying he’d run out of breath.

And a remark that should’ve felt as if it had just come out of the blue, but didn’t. As I shook hands at the door—some of the grips disturbingly limp, a few uncomfortably hard, and all of them too quick for good manners—Maisie, smelling of that morning’s diaper, tottered over and said, “I suppose now you’ll want the key to the attic.”

“Hey, we’re here. You want to get some coffee?”

“Yes, please.” I shake myself awake, groggy and stiff. It’s dark. I check the road signs and the map crumpled in my lap, and see that I’ve travelled eight hundred miles today. “Are you stopping for the night?”

“Yeah. What about you?”

“I need to keep going.”

I hop down from the passenger seat and watch as he backs his truck into an impossibly narrow parking space. His name is Chook Travis. I wait for him at the diner door.

“Thanks for the ride. I’m sorry I wasn’t better company.”

“That’s okay. Tell you the truth, you looked as if you needed the sleep.”

“Tell you the truth, you were right. Here, let me buy you some supper.”

I hold out two twenties. He takes one with a grin. “Thanks.” I wait. It happens. His smile fades, and, like every trucker I’ve ridden with today, he takes another look at my bruised face and my wedding ring, and holds out his cell phone. “Sure you don’t want to call someone?”

“No, thanks anyway.”

Like all the others, he doesn’t ask any more questions. Probably wouldn’t answer any, either—truck drivers are, by and large, a chivalrous lot.

I can’t tell them I have no one to call. Anyway, the only phone number I’ve ever memorized is Grayman’s, and the way my luck is running he’d probably answer.

The diner is busy, even this late. It’s nice to be on familiar ground again, but I keep to the corners as I wait for my sandwich, just in case someone recognizes me. It’s a long shot, and maybe it wouldn’t matter, but I don’t want anyone from the valley to hear tell of me. I eat outside, watching the lot lizards in their high heels trolling for business.

A big man exits the diner and makes a beeline for me. I immediately wonder where I should hit him to bring him down the fastest. “Excuse me? My friend in there says you need a ride north.” I glance back through the diner window. Chook sees me looking, nods toward my companion, and gives me a thumbs-up. I tip him a two-fingered salute.

“Thanks. I’d appreciate it.”

Truckers travel a different line of sight than other drivers, seen but only briefly noticed. Few people could describe a rig a minute after passing it, even fewer could identify the driver. I don’t think they’re supposed to carry riders; something about insurance. But it’s a different world up here. Different rules. The trucker who picked me up at dawn passed me on to another when he stopped, and they’ve been moving me north ever since.

Grayman was a big fan of hiding in plain sight. I didn’t think much of the old sayings he liked to spout, like
The more things change, the more they stay the same
and
All good things must end
, but
People don’t notice what’s right in front of them
was disturbingly true.

Ten miles up the highway, Chook’s friend offers me his cell. “You want to call someone?”

“No, thanks anyway.”

He lets it go, thank God. I have no answers for either of us. I don’t know what to do except get as far away from Riser’s Valley as I can.

The trouble is, part of me never left.

A flurry of whispers blew around the pastor’s drawing room as I entered. Apparently I shouldn’t have been at the reception, either. Then Bryce Simon said, “Would you like a cup of tea, Nell?” The offer was more than kind—he didn’t expect me to know rules no one had taught me. He didn’t think the dancing bear actually knew the minuet.

“That would be nice.”

What I really wanted was a glass of the sherry Mrs. Vance knew better than to serve with Davena around, and what I wanted more a moment later was to throw it in Davena’s face. Even for her, it took a lot of gall to yank the hair-stick out of my bun, letting my hair fall down my back. She waved it in front of my face and said, “You don’t have the right to wear this now.”

There was an appalled gasp from my neighbours, who knew that a decent woman doesn’t wear her hair down in public, and another as I snatched the stick back with one hand and cracked her across the mouth with the other. Watching her stagger back, pale with shock, I think I might have smiled.

A soft voice beside me said, “Nell, you must be tired. May I drive you home?”

“Please.”

Bryce walked out without a look at his wife. He didn’t speak again until we’d passed the place where Micah’s car had gone off the road the day before. The skid marks were black and ugly.

“She doesn’t always think before she acts,” he said. I noted he hadn’t actually expressed regret for her behaviour. “Josie should’ve told you, but I suppose she didn’t think you’d need to know for a while. The hair-stick comes out as soon as you hear of your husband’s death. You braid your hair until you come out of mourning.”

“Oh.” I’d never noticed that. But then, I’d never seen anyone actually
mourn
in the valley.

“Just keep it in mind.” As he pulled up to the house he asked, “Will you be all right here alone?”

“I’ll be fine. I just need some rest.” I turned to thank him for the ride, and caught him eying my hair like most men would bare breasts. I got out and hurried inside, locking the door as he drove away.

The quiet was a relief. I was glad for the bed of coals in the kitchen stove, and the wood fire snapping in it a minute later. The fridge was stuffed with food the neighbours had brought that morning, far too much for one person. I ate a sandwich; then, when it stayed down, I ate another. It wasn’t the time to let myself get weak.

I left the lights off, knowing the neighbours were watching the house. I didn’t even have to wonder about it. Most of the women would have known that Josie had the house keys on her when she died, including the one for the attic door. I wondered if any of them had ever been told they had no right to wear their husband’s hair-stick.

I braided my hair then, combing my fingers through it as Micah used to do. He’d been a good husband to me. He’d never thought of me as an outsider. But sitting there in the dark, I realized he’d been the only thing protecting me from those who did.

I’m sorry to have left Emery. Sorry I’ll never go back to that little town. It’s funny, I guess, that I arrived there wanting more than anything to keep moving. But, sitting on the bench outside the grocery store, waiting for the next bus that would take me farther away from Grayman, an accident happened: I noticed my surroundings.

The closest I’d ever been to the country was robbing a house with a back yard. I was a city girl, raised in a puzzle of alleys and shortcuts. No photo had ever prepared me for Emery—I could see for miles just by moving my eyes. The distant mountains were green-turning-gold, the sky an unnameable blue.

Whether I was simply starved for beauty, or exhausted from being on high alert for too long, my sudden yearning for peace and quiet was stronger than my fear of Grayman.

I wanted to stay there; the waitress I replaced at the truck stop wanted out. Her job was nothing new to me, and I liked the boss. Ace gave his girls one free meal a day and kept his nose out of our personal lives. Most of the customers were nice enough, and I could handle the ones who weren’t—there are ways to show a predator which of you has the sharpest teeth, and I know most of them.

I rented a small trailer across the road. The owner said, “It’s nothing fancy, but it’s clean and in good repair.” I checked the door locks. It would have taken me at least three minutes to pick them, which meant it would take most other thieves longer. There was hot and cold running water, just enough furniture, and a place to hide my exit bag. I paid for three months in advance, thinking two might be the longest I could resist the urge to keep running. But I stayed put. I liked tuning my radio to the Top 40 instead of the police report. I liked wandering up the highway to take in the scenery, and the occasional drive to the nearest big town with the cook, Shana, when we had an afternoon off.

During one of those drives I noticed the road sign for Riser’s Valley.

“What’s down there?” I asked.

“Not much. I went down one evening, just to sightsee, you know? Six o’clock and there was nobody on the streets. You could see them through the windows, having supper. A few of them come into the stop once in a while, but they don’t say much. They don’t seem to know how to talk to outsiders.”

Quite a few of our customers fit that description. Some were just shy. “A valley? Sounds pretty.”

“I guess.”

I tried out the free internet at the town library. There were no hits for Riser’s Valley. That seemed just about quiet enough.

I didn’t think about being lonely. I’d never had real friends; I’d never known any real love but my mother’s. I thought you couldn’t miss what you’d never had.

Until the day Micah walked into the diner.

In the valley, on the day before his wedding, the groom gives his intended a wooden hair-stick. The bride twists her hair up into a bun and inserts the stick to hold it in place. Her husband takes it out on their wedding night, knowing that from then on he’s the only man who’ll see her hair down.

Micah made mine from oak, a splinter of a pew from an abandoned church. He and his father, Ben, had torn the building down for the new property owner, who didn’t care what happened to the wood as long as they hauled it off his land.

He drove me past the site as he took me to meet his parents. “I thought it was a handsome building,” he said, “even if it
was
old and weathered. I’m glad you have a piece of it now.”

“So am I. Thank you, dear.”

He blushed when I called him
dear
. He was a year younger than me, but sometimes it might as well have been ten. I’d always thought of myself as cold, had never been in love to know how it should feel. But I did love him, I think. He was soft-spoken and steady. He’d never been anywhere near the world I’d escaped. In the year he was courting me, he brought me trinkets and wild flowers. He waited until I finished my shift and walked me home. He barely touched me for the first three months, until I said, “Micah, will you
please
kiss me now?”

Even then he hesitated. He combed his fingers through my hair, almost as dark as his, as straight as his was curly. Ran them over my face until we were both breathing hard. But his kiss was gentle and tentative, and he backed away first. I wondered if he’d ever touched a woman before.

But he didn’t speak to me much beyond placing his order when he came in the diner with Ben. After a while I realized his father didn’t know about us. I didn’t ask Micah why; I had too many secrets of my own to criticize his. He was getting ready to start his own life, I thought. I was his first big decision.

Not knowing who my own father was, I liked watching Micah with his. Hearing them talk about their work. Like most good carpenters, they were in demand. They built furniture, gazebos, and park benches, and rough boxes for every undertaker who asked. They built whatever they could turn their hands to, and sold it all.

Micah told me this when he gave me my hair stick. “You’ll never go hungry, I promise. I can keep you well.” He didn’t ask about my past, or why I had no photos of my family. He just said, “We’re going to have a long time to get to know each other,” as if it explained everything.

He was young and hopeful for the future. I didn’t know any better. Eloping was a romantic notion.

Grayman would’ve laughed his head off.

On my last day at the diner Ace said, “Did you tell the other girls you’re going?”

“No.”

“Going to?”

“I don’t think so.” I hadn’t even told Shana I was getting married—I didn’t want her throwing me a bridal shower with presents and guests and a photographer from the local paper.

“You want me to give them your goodbyes?”

“If you would.”

“No problem. Take care.”

I stopped in the ladies’ room to twist up my hair and shove the stick into place. Outside it was already dark, a fall rain promising to get harder. The back lot was empty, but that would change as visibility worsened.