Beautiful to the Bone (The Enuis Trilogy #1) Page 9

  When I placed my ear along the neighbor’s wall, the sound moved farther into my apartment, progressively filling me. Not again. Blood flowing more quickly. I scrubbed my palms with sanitizer, very thoroughly, then every finger. There was a practical explanation for what I was hearing, something in the structure of the building perhaps.

  I want out, a man with a thin distant voice said. He laughed hysterically, a rippling laugh. Chilling.

  I pulled my coat tighter hoping it would calm the flow of blood in and out of my heart. My clinched transparent hand was almost the same color as the coat’s muted purple. Shake it out. I would breathe him away, purge him, some errant neighbor or radio wave. Something.

  He tightened inside me. Like my heart valves couldn’t keep up. I sought shelter in the high-backed cabriole-legged chair and, still gripping the bottle of disinfectant, settled into it. The bottle went back into my coat pocket and my legs pulled up under me, legs as bleached as the fragments of Harold’s incinerated bones. Stop. I lit a candle and pulled my journal from the small red cedar box on the triangular table. Tugging my pen from the fold in the journal, I began to write:

  “Harold . . .”

  I got no further, the apex beat hauling away my breath. The damned unopened carton of his books, all that I had left of him, sat a mere ten feet away. It was as if he, too, wanted to be set free to clutter my mind and squirrel into my chest, to point out my lack of tangible results. Or was it something more incriminating?

  Since arriving at The Octagon, the voices traveling through me had been brief though increasing. The man’s tinny voice resumed, gurgling in and out of me as if I was plugged into the walls. The candle flickered. If they were the prophetic voices of ‘my gift,’ I couldn’t decipher any kinship.

  “No,” I announced to the dark apartment though I retreated deeper into the chair. “Please.” I lowered my right leg to the floor and stomped it very hard three times. “Just stop!”

  Stomping only heightened the obsession in the man’s hushed voice: Come with me. Get out while you can. The journal sat untouched in my lap. I held my chest. A panic attack. His voice had the quality of cracking ice. He rattled a contaminated wheeze, fought for a full breath. It was my breath, without my voice or consent. Underwater, thumping.

  A guttural whimper accelerated maniacally to a shriek, like a colossal lobster thrown into scalding water. Sam scurried around the cage.

  “Sammy, did you hear that?” His metal cage tinkled.

  I took a slow deep breath. Hypothalamus, pituitary, adrenals. Between stimulus and response is a space. It’s my power to choose. But it was all bottled air, and not much of it.

  “Please. This is stupid. Something I ate.” I trembled. I was losing myself. I pulled the cuffs of my sleeves over my fingers, anything to grab onto. Who could I call? No one. And whose fault was that?

  Soon I’d be spinning. I turned to the Manhattan skyline: real, teeming with life. A reasonable account would be revealed. I’d laugh at myself. These voices are in my head, not here, not real, please stop. I’ll turn on the light. The candle wax had more chance of moving than I did.

  My thoughts seemed to prompt a response, two women groaning from the corner where my small bed was once refuge, yet the moans also seemed to come out of me. Chaotic. Choking. Wearying. I ached for water. I heaved.

  Turn on the light! Yes! screeched the young one.

  I rubbed the chair’s embroidered arms. Ground me. I couldn’t find my own voice. Breathe.

  Yes, be useful for once, said the older one. No more tests.

  Dry sounds exploded from my mouth, I was drowning in sand. So many ways to suffocate: a pillow, a fire, a noose.

  Then above the gagging, she added, Mr. Dickens was here. He wasn’t fooled by what he saw. Trust him, if not yourself. He will tell.

  I hugged myself as hard as I could. Dumbass superstition. I should be free of this crap. Wake up!

  I slapped my face. There was a perfectly simple explanation. I was underwater, yet everything came too fast. The heavy wallop of my heart escalating. The candle went out. The skyline disappeared. I couldn’t bear my own reflection or my constantly darting eyes, could not raise my voice. My throat, drawn and knotted, hardly took in air. My chest will explode.

  A shaking hand —my shaking hand— fell to the armrest, and I lifted myself, only to slip to the cold, damp floor, cold and damp like wet concrete. Piss on concrete. I was beached. Scavengers soon to descend upon my body. The infected smell and wetness seeped under my fingernails, through my palms and coursed up my arms, towards my chest with a tucking sound. Contaminated. I’ll die contaminated. If I could only get to the sink to wash my hands.

  Oh please. I’ll wake up. I’m capable, I’m powerful, I can control —.

  The voices and my thudding heart filled the room and my body all at once, like hot ricocheting wires cutting across the space at every angle. Awkward. Unacceptable. Impotent. Worthless. I saw my keys. I reached for them. Once in hand, I stared at them unable to recall their purpose. Tools of some type? Weapons?

  Oh, Mr. Dickens . . . I am lovely . . . said the young woman coquettishly . . . I’m beautiful to the bone . . . don’t forget me.

  I strained for air and lunged for the door handle. Dragging my legs like a fallen paraplegic, I pulled myself through the door, over the threshold, and crawled out of the apartment, terrified. The door latched behind me. The hallway still existed as a stage set without life. Tidy, but not comforting. The voices muffled, dissipating from my body or buried below my clanging heart, but debris still swirled through my head. I needed air, real air, to sort out the mounting bedlam.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Out of the Octagon rotunda, away from its lights, I headed across the brittle snow for the turbulent waters and the small lighthouse at the end of the island. I passed the anonymous machinery and vacant six-wheel semis parked behind the neighboring “specialty rehabilitation” hospital. More damaged people. More pain.

  I considered my impotence. Maybe I was just taking up space, unable to help, just as I was unable to help Harold. I quickened my pace.

  Scarcely 100 yards from the Octagon’s stone steps, the edge of the narrow island summoned me. Thirty-seven years of empirical evidence was damning: I was unqualified as a scientist, everything I’d studied passionately was without result, and everyone I’d embraced ardently was now lifeless. A soiled existence. Like Momma said, my face reflected my estrangement from god.

  I drew the hair from my face; frost had formed in it. Maybe the best way to end the steady contradictions erupting in my mind and body — the daily tremors in the lab; the surges impaling me on the streets; the currents breeding in my own apartment— was to cleanse the planet of my stain. Baptism. Salvation.

  I’d never imagined life would be so hard. Or beauty so elusive. But hadn’t it always been? Hadn’t Harold tried to alert me before he himself succumbed . . . to what? To his voices? To life’s insatiable equations? To his constant weakness? To me?

  I longed in that moment to feel the protection of the water, to slip into the lakes and be released, to feel beautiful. No one could take those away from me, those moments of my own. In that moment . . . to slip into the river . . . to freeze permanently the miry drone in my ears, the feelings in my chest, my fractured DNA . . . and disappear. To be absolved. That could be peaceful.

  The frigid air emboldened me. I stepped over the chain with the sign forbidding my presence after dark.

  The park lamps, mid-nineteenth century reproductions, tall black hanging figures with decoratively cast lights in each hand, led the way to the shore. Not Bemidji. Those lamps that were functioning at all strained in the night’s steel mist.

  I opened and closed my jaw attempting to clear my ears. My heart still beat heavy and fast, my chest sore from the seizure. Weary, I shambled toward the water’s edge. Where was the science in this? The predictability? The reality? If I couldn’t help myself, if my judgment was always shifting to the whims of momentar
y experience, how could I ever hope to help others? How could I ever dissect beauty?

  A good scientist unlearns her feelings if she hopes to cleanly navigate her data. I was apparently unable to do so. Momma infused me with spooks even though I didn’t believe in them. Was the world really always taking away like Momma said?

  And Harold. Harold. Full of unseen traps and missing parts.

  I was ready to sleep. Nemo. How Nemo died. Maybe it’s simple, lovely . . . to drift away, unnoticed. The way his owners tossed him in the lake, to chill, to drown, to slumber.

  A step through a fallen oval of light and I snickered at my pitying self. “I’m pathetic.” And dry. My lips covered in paste. I wet them again and again, but it wasn’t enough. I stuck out my tongue so the charred New York winter sat exposed, prickly on it. Gritty, as if I’d dipped it into Harold’s ashes and savored them. An acquired taste? You have to get used to things, Eunis. Create certainty.

  I drew another breath and cross-referenced the night’s expectant moisture with those in Minnesota, when — as I stood in Momma’s small back entryway — I could tell Carly exactly when the snow would start falling and for how long, solely from a sound in my ears and the frequency in my chest. It had seemed so natural.

  At the base of the desolate stone lighthouse I gazed upward, past two dark cell-like window slits, the watchtower clearly long deserted. Yet leaning against the gothic building, my fingertips stuck to the coarse measured stone, the same layered blocks of DNA as The Octagon. I pulled away.

  Sultry clouds dragged along the underbelly of the night sky, accentuating the empty lighthouse parapet. When briefly the moon revealed and beamed momentarily down, I stared up at it; no doubt my face reflected the pallor of the moon, cold, leached, colorless. The de novo mutant. I couldn’t be sure if the intervening clouds were natural or from the smokestacks out past the treacherous Hell’s Gate waters along FDR Drive. But I was mesmerized by the violent brine and filled with calm.

  And then there was light in the lighthouse.

  “Nelly? Is that you?”

  I shuddered. “Oh, shoot.”

  “Is that you?” He opened the metal door of the lighthouse.

  Patina rippled in the moonlight. My atoms slowed as I turned to granite. The restless waters called to me again, stronger and impatient: sleep forever without feeling.

  I’m reaching for hell, like you said, Momma. Now comes The Devil, germ line cut.

  Below his hulking dark silhouette, a candle sat on the floor next to a sleeping bag. Shadow obscured his face.

  The Dark Man and I stood there for an eternity, without a word. No sensible explanations came. I was immobilized.

  The end might be painful; I did not want to die.

  His body swayed. The wind whistled and passed away, just as atoms had stalled in my Minnesota room when the worst was about to strike. His breath steamed out into the winter air and I conjured it rank and nauseating, smelling of earthly demons – alcohol, tobacco, junk food —partially chewed, unwashed; the imperfections of life.

  I grasped for logic, correcting myself aloud, “It’s the damn vending machine food. Mycotoxins. I’m hallucinating. Get a grip.”

  “Banshee, Angel of Death,” he broke his silence, “you are not my dear Ellen, you are not my eternal beauty. You have come to take me. I see your eyes flying around me, but I am not ready to go to your darkness. I have more to see, more to tell.”

  “You’re not real,” I said. “None of this crap is. I’m having some sort of a breakdown, but it won’t last.”

  “Nothing lasts.” He stretched the ‘s’ until it drifted out and over the churning water. He staggered a bit backward as wind curled around us. “Nothing lasts . . . babies, marriages, beauty, dreams, ‘that mysterious condition to which we are all tending —the stopped life, the broken threads of yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but abandoned occupation, all are images of Death.’ Death is coming. Let’s dance while we can.” He held out a ragged glove hand.

  I’d heard this passage before, from Harold! Friggin’ Harold.

  Backing away, I stumbled into a snow bank, falling on icy crust. I floundered but the ice on my fingertips grounded me. I rubbed frost over my face.

  He stepped forward, loomed over me. “Not a dancer? Oh, but you should. It is all that is left and what we can do together. It will be beautiful. Like my Nelly.” He lurched to and fro.

  He came around me. In the dim flickering glow of the lighthouse candle, I saw his face: mid-fifties, graying sideburns tangled and unkempt. His nose came to a point above and beyond his nostrils. Devilish. His eyes, overcast and twitching, and his pupils, deep pits of despair, were conspicuously unmatched.

  He pitched forward, let out a ghastly gagging sound and, with a liquid stream the color of fleshy tissue filled with red chunks, vomited to the ground. Drunk.

  He wiped the excess with his sleeve. “Do not want to dance with me? You are scared? Of me?” He appeared surprised and sobered. “‘I can’t get anything that unites reason with beauty.’”

  “I’m going now.” I straightened up but I couldn’t stand without touching him. The thought repulsed me.

  “Do not be scared.” His soiled right arm stabbed at me, just like Momma would. “Your saturnine face . . . there is infection in your mind. What is your sickness? You look like a ghost.”

  “What?”

  “Everyone has infection. What has become of your face?”

  “Your infection is liquor. Let me pass.”

  His eyes changed direction, wandered beyond me, over my shoulder. “Liquor?” he said, almost wistfully, while turning to the New York skyline, as if we were suddenly having cocktails on an east side terrace, the party in full swing.

  “Yes.” I took a generous swig of cold air and considered his dementia, his drunkenness, probably both. Even with his extra five or six inches, I might have been able to take him. He seemed chastened.

  “Liquor has got you.” I stood. I couldn’t imagine what else to say. Where to run? Snow piled up everywhere around us. Even if I screamed, who would hear, my voice merging with the wind?

  “Liquor . . .” he repeated, wobbling two steps back and offering me a free path out, “. . . not so perceptive. No, the doctors say it’s PSP. I’m sick but not ready to die. You are no banshee. You are but a sad heart, a dark hallucination blinded of your instinct and intuition. You are from that mad, avoided house over there.” He pointed to the cluster of buildings edging the park. “I am often confused. I apologize.”

  His offer of freedom and his unexpected tenderness surprised and unnerved me, as if I had any ballast left.

  “But,” he grumbled, “who are you to say I am not real? I am as real as you. Touch me.”

  I recoiled.

  Then louder he said, “Test your perceptions, madam. I am your witness, I give you voice. My writing is for you particularly.”

  The freeze in my shoulders evaporated. “For me?”

  “You and the others. Dickens,” he stated with some humility. “Charles Dickens.” Again he extended the “s” and almost fell over.

  I considered steadying him, but no. The man needed help, and I wanted to give it. But whether due to my weariness or my fear of his volatility and his filth, I did not. “Ah, Mr. Dickens . . . are you from the ‘mad house,’ the hospital over there?”

  “The mad house? No, no. I am an outpatient at the hospital. But dear woman, I understand your confusion. ‘I cannot say that I derived much comfort from the inspection of this charity in which you live. Everything had a lounging, listless, madhouse air, which was very painful. The moping idiot, cowering down with long disheveled hair; the gibbering maniac, with his hideous laugh and pointed finger; the vacant eye, the fierce, wild face, the gloomy picking of the hands and lips, and munching of the nails: there they were all, without disguise, in naked ugliness and horror. The terrible crowd with which these halls and galleries were filled, so shocked me, that I abridged my stay withi
n the shortest limits.’ But you—”

  I forced myself. “Mr. Dickens, maybe I can help.”

  “No, I cannot be saved. But as you have apparently survived that dark place, I will re-imagine you as inherently free and capable of following your own presentiments. Feed the light. Remember you are only a visitor there.” He shuddered and turned to the lighthouse. “It is far too cold out here. Do you wish to come in?”

  “What?”

  “No, you cannot yet imagine that. Very well, do as you wish. But remember, you are only a visitor there.” He turned and wobbled the four steps to the lighthouse, then ratcheted closed the thick studded-metal door.

  I stood in darkness, unsure whether I was relieved to be set free or disappointed that I’d been abandoned. “Who needs to be saved?” I said into the wind, then turned in a complete circle, as if the answer might be across the river in Queens, or on the path back to The Octagon, or across the quarter mile to New York’s east side.

  The feral waters broke on three sides of me in a wet pitch-black language that I couldn’t organize. My chest ached from exhaustion but told me nothing more. I gaped one last time at the splinter of unsteady light from the lighthouse window-slits. Then they, too, went dark.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I finally found the front entrance to the Metzinger, the rehabilitation hospital, and to my relief the corridor lights had been dimmed to a blue hue. It was four in the morning. Out of the wind I had to ask myself if I had been listening to Harold too long, all that Dickens stuff? But if Charles was real I had to do something or I’d add regret to my unrest.

  No one was at the front desk. Quick action from the hospital staff was required. I didn’t think Charles could survive the night.

  But that clinic, it was such an open, public place, with an uneasy smell of floor wax and rubbing alcohol. Atoms recoiled. I stepped forward.