Sarah Blackman
Ugly Jug
Lately, Tilly had been spending a lot of time driving around. She had been in this place for only two years and already she seemed to herself like the sort of person who had lived as a child in one house and then, when her body grew to a size that suggested womanhood, purchased another house with a similar floor plan just down the street. This was not true, but did it matter? At a certain point everything filled out to fit their enclosure. “Not just for goldfish anymore,” Tilly said.
“If they were going to erect some sort of monument to you, which feature would you like them to flatteringly exaggerate?” her boyfriend asked her. Tilly recognized the question as the opening salvo to a game of a psychological nature. Whatever she answered was supposed to reveal a hidden truth about her psyche or her aberrant desires. Her boyfriend’s name was Lou Blevins; Louis Blevins, Jr. actually, but she had always called him Lou Blevins. They met on the fly, almost literally. It was in an airport lounge— Tilly waiting on a flight to San Francisco where she was supposed to attend a conference; Lou Blevins playing desultory saxophone in the band. They were one of those couples. They had such a great story—just such a really great story—that the morning after the night they first slept together, when Lou Blevins pulled the airport motel’s fire-resistant bedspread back from her shoulders, gently bit her well-developed trapezoidal muscle and said, “Just think of the story we’ll have to tell our grandchildren,” she did not laugh, or shudder, or shove him away in disgust as she might have another man so presumptuous after such short acquaintance.
That was the power of their happenstance. Tilly often wondered about it, the sequence of days before and after. How might her life have been altered if she had, say, gone down to the boardwalk the day before she met Lou Blevins to have her tarot read rather than for a hike in the foothills above town where, no matter how often she turned, the city was always behind her. In the foothills, she worried inordinately about mountain lions, their lithe hides blending in contour with the equally lithe, equally predatory landscape. On the boardwalk, she worried about pickpockets. The conference was for work—a strategies assessment training with vendors, branded tote bags, shoddily made complimentary pens. The job was new, jury still out, but the tote bag would probably come in handy. Even through the haze of first love, it seemed likely that in her future life she might need to sling a sack of assorted items very quickly over her shoulder and go. “Bug out,” said Lou Blevins, correcting her. Whatever was the point.
Lou Blevins was actually something of a musical genius. He was playing with the airport bar band for cigarette money, drink money, money for new saxophone reeds. Also as a private joke, a sort of sight gag riffing off the nature of music played by men as the soundtrack for other men listening to music in bars. Which is not what he told her, but what she later surmised. This was Los Angeles in 2002. Nervous, jittery, the city’s pride was hurt. Someday it was slated to slide off the continent and into the cold blue bowl of the Pacific, but until then how was the city supposed to demonstrate its heroism and vulnerability? How was it supposed to rise to the occasion? The very afternoon that she met Lou Blevins, Tilly had witnessed a man in aviator sunglasses point at an Asian woman in a cartoon-patterned hospital facemask and yell, “SARS! SARS!,” but it was clear his heart wasn’t in it. Disaster should be sudden, not endemic. It should rage virile across the city’s exhausted but willing neighborhoods, not seep. In 2002, Los Angeles dreamt of fire raining from above, but when the hills caught, outstripped the firebreaks and torched in liquid rills down toward the city’s basin, it still wasn’t enough. Where was the vengeful eye measuring them for destruction? What did New York have to hate that they did not?
Lou Blevins said he moved to Los Angeles because he had come to a point in his composition that needed to sound like glass breaking. Three years later, when he relocated them to a shanty ranch in New Mexico, he insisted it was because he now needed to hear the sound of glass being born. After that, he got off glass entirely and they moved north. Up to Boise, then a year on the high, thin platter of Denver; down again to Roswell—only for eight months while Lou Blevins tried to master the theremin—until she, exploring her creative side, brought home a library book on the history and practice of Catawba Valley pottery. She had a vague memory of pinch pots from a childhood class and thought she might again take up the practice, but she never even got to sink her thumbs into the block of clay she bought for the endeavor. Lou Blevins was so taken with the grainy pictures of jugs bearing grotesque human faces—the handles molded into ears, flared nostrils dewed with condensation—that before she knew it they had rented a truck and were towing all their belongings across the New Mexican desert toward the Carolinas. Tilly drove and Lou Blevins pointed out each blue mesa as it appeared along the horizon. Months later, she unpacked the block of clay from the bottom of a final box and found it hardened and spidered with cracks. She put it in the front yard next to the bird bath where it slowly dissolved.
“Does it have to be a body part?” Tilly didn’t know what she meant by this. She was just buying time. They were in the kitchen, a house they had bought instead of renting, which she couldn’t help but feel was a bad sign. Lou Blevins was cheerfully taking apart the blender. This was something he did on a fairly regular basis—a ritual which Tilly recognized as an indication that his composition was going well. She supposed she ought to feel cheerful along with him, but she had seen the insides of the blender so often it was hard to muster the enthusiasm. The blender was deceptively complex. All sorts of different patinas and textures: blue rubberized wire casings, oily black washers, the copper disc of the motor housing and the minute coils of the brush springs, so precise, so easy to lose. Disarticulated and spread across the countertop, the parts didn’t seem to have a ready relationship either to each other or to the seagrass green casing listing on the far side of the stove. They might as well have been a collection of thimbles, or scratch-off tickets, or tiny, hollow bird skulls as component parts designed to facilitate the blender’s grating, grinding, crushing, liquefying, and pureeing. She supposed it was a problem with her perspective.
“I guess not,” said Lou Blevins. He tapped the motor’s clamshell housing against his thigh in a jaunty rhythm. “You could commission a sculpture that flatteringly exaggerated your pants, I suppose. If you wanted to.” It was only nine o’clock and Tilly had already finished her work for the day. She was too efficient. She didn’t sleep well. For the last ten years she’d been employed by a consortium of retail emporiums that titled itself Amalgamated Textiles United, or A.T.U., an acronym that underscored the consortium’s essential philosophy of attack-based marketing. She started as a secret shopper—or Clandestine Personnel Observation Agent, as the consortium preferred to term her position. On her first day, she was given an official handbook and reference guide that instructed her to create a series of alter egos for her observational excursions and rotate them regularly. This, the handbook suggested, would keep her in the mind-set of a consumer, someone with a specific and pressing need for the graphic tee-shirts, cargo pants, cashmere-ish tassel scarves, and Cool Kicks LED Light-Up sneakers the consortium’s various vendors provided to their regular, non- clandestine clientele.
The two day training session was hosted in the conference pavilion of a hotel right off Redondo Beach. Tilly and her fellow Agents were guided through the various secret shopper archetypes by the consortium’s spokesperson, a tall man with very red lips. “Ladies, you can be a Frustrated Mother Getting By on a Low-Income Budget, or, for the younger set, a Co-Ed Shopping for a Very Big Date,” he said, his lips so red they looked to Tilly as if they floated just in front of his actual lips; lush, painful lips superimposed over the specter of his real face. Some options for the men were Young Executive Shopping for a Golf Outing with the Boss, and Retiree Forced to Reenter the Workforce.
“The key is to think of a situation in which you are imperiled,” said the spokesperson. “This can be an ongoing psychological endangerment or—as in the Co-Ed Shopping for a Very Big Date— something in the nature of a likely future peril that will come to pass if your commercial needs are not met in a thorough and timely fashion.” The spokesperson had a habit of swinging his hands open and closed over his stomach as if they were tiny, hinged doors providing equally tiny glimpses of what lay behind. His shirt buttons, his belt buckle, the puckered pleat of his dress pants.
“Can it be a physical peril?” asked a fellow Agent-In-Training, seated to her left. “Could I be an archetype who is being imperiled by a Mexican drug lord or a pack of trained pit bulls?” the man asked, leaning over his knees as if he were in pain.
“No,” said the spokesperson. “We at A.T.U. would like to stress the importance of subtlety in planning your Observational Excursions.” He clapped his hands gently on the words “stress” and “subtlety” to underscore his point, but it was too late. The room filled with eager buzzing as people imagined themselves imperiled by their ex-boyfriends, the CIA, an arch-villain with the power to exude antipodal appendages at will. The spokesperson clapped his hands louder. He tightened his lips, pressing them together so firmly the red blanched momentarily pink, then white. A five- minute recess was called.
This was in the days before she had met Lou Blevins. Thirty- two days before she met Lou Blevins to be precise, but there was no way of knowing then what an insignificant moment she was occupying in her timeline. Tilly recalled believing it was actually quite a significant moment. A new beginning, an opportunity. In the hotel courtyard there was a pool and a squat gazebo surrounded by hibiscus. The hibiscus were pink and orange, deepening in the interior of their slender throats to ruby and gold. Tilly thought the stamens springing from the flower’s bells looked like startled faces, as if the petals themselves had drawn back in shock, leaving their faces naked in their surprise. The pool was green and heaved gently with mosquito larva. Three trim, black-backed phoebes were taking turns swooping down from the gazebo’s roof to skim the surface of the pool, larvae scissored in their beaks.
Tilly sat in the gazebo and lit a cigarette. None of the other Agents-In-Training came out of the conference room. Through the sliding glass door, she could see the dim outline of their shapes clustered around the coffee and doughnut table. She opened her official handbook and began making a list of possible personas for herself. Clumsy Woman, Energetic Woman, she wrote. Woman Who Has Had Many Surgeries, Woman Who Collects Erotic Sculptures, Woman Whose House Has Caught Fire While She’s Gone.
Somewhere, she still had that handbook. It had been a long time since she needed to look at it. It turned out she had a special talent for organizing diverse information into a comprehensible whole. Her reports were concise, color-coded. An A.T.U. representative named Bradley bin Zayed had emailed her to say she was the most efficient Clandestine Personnel Observation Agent in company history and to offer her a promotion to Regional Field Operational Manager, which she had accepted. Shortly thereafter, her region had been expanded to At-Large, the pay scale adjusted accordingly. Now she worked from home organizing diverse information into a comprehensible whole and then emailing that whole to her contact list: bbinzayed20, mmkaskavitch, lippy265, elizabeth.turturo@ hotmail.com and so on.
Sometimes, she typed her comments in the body of the emails in a flowy green font, just for fun. This made her feel omnipotent in a utilitarian sort of way—as if her flowy green font was the calm, sexy voice of the computer pointing out to the panicking StarCraft engineering crew a scientifically sound, yet philosophically elegant, solution to the problem of their imminent core meltdown. She and Lou Blevins watched a lot of outer space shows. Lou Blevins took notes for his composition and sometimes argued about plot points with the characters on the screen. Tilly admired the way the characters could keep so many different abstruse frames of reference in their minds at the same time. Not just theoretical physics, but theoretical physics in the sixth dimension. Not just company policy on interoffice romances, but also the cultural mores of the amphibious Betamorph ensign third-class one was about to bed.
Mostly, though, Tilly’s work made her feel like a joint. Necessary to the function of the limb, like an elbow or a knee, but only really noticeable when something went wrong. It was an email existence. Other than a yearly conference—this year slated for Milwaukee, to her dismay—the only interaction Tilly had with the company was through her inbox and her bank account. Lou Blevins had soundproofed the tool shed in the back yard and taken it over as his studio. Tilly had soundproofed her own psyche and sent it bouncing off geostationary satellites to fragment around the word. Lou Blevins had partially reassembled the blender and was twirling a brush spring between his fingers. His eyes drifted up above the kitchen cabinets as he tapped some little rhythm out against his front teeth with his tongue. It was not that he was handsome so much as memorable, Tilly thought. His nose was very striking, very eloquent, and it implied something forceful about his character that he did not often exhibit in everyday life. But it was also true that his hair was starting to thin. Recently, he had shaved off his sideburns and what this revealed about his jawline made Tilly sad.
“da Da da Da da Dee,” said Lou Blevins, throwing his head back to look at the ceiling and drawing the brush spring gently over his Adam’s apple. He had been working on his composition for a full fifteen years now, a third of Tilly’s own life. It was an epic, a multi-opera with aspirations to Dante. When it was completed, Lou Blevins intended to immerse the audience in a deep space western which centered on a polyamorous romance between three women, a pornographic demon named X, and the sinister Space Cowboy, whose entrance was often signaled by a piercing steam whistle blast. He was at a crucial junction, he told Tilly. This was an intersection between the story lines that could resolve the major problem of the opera—which was mainly the fact that Lou Blevins himself was exclusively interested in the part of the demon X and didn’t give a fig for anyone else.
X was based on a Catawba jug Lou Blevins had picked up at a local festival. The jug was made of gritty yellow clay. It had slightly crossed almond-shaped eyes, expressive eyebrows, a humorous mouth. Its ears were lumpy and sat unevenly on its head. Above them, the jug handles performed melodious arabesques and then swooped in again to meld with the stubby little poot of a neck that rose like an indecent, puckered, for some reason sooty, orifice from the center of the jug’s head. Lou Blevins was very taken with this jug. He carried it with him around the house for Tilly to discover lodged in various places. On top of the bookshelf, in the pantry, peeking out from behind the bottom pane of their bedroom’s French doors. Once, Tilly had asked, “If you like X so much why don’t you just make the opera about him?”
“It,” Lou Blevins had replied. “Ungendered. Incapable of being described by conventional gender coding. Squishy It—like mud or molasses or tar. Enveloping.” Then he had laughed. “Anyway, if I did that the instrumentation would consist of nothing but trombones. You can’t have an opera with nothing but trombones. It’s obscene.”
“Or, what do you think, Da da da Da Da Dum?” Lou Blevins said. The blender lay forgotten on the counter where it would be left until at least the next morning. At one time Tilly would have put the parts in an empty stationery box for safekeeping, but no longer. Now she threw the boxes out, sometimes before she even used up all the stationery. Box and stationery both—in the can! It gave Tilly pleasure. To waste. To disregard. Lou Blevins rolled his eyes to look at her over the prow of his nose and dropped the brush spring. It bounced under the kitchen table and came to rest in a crack in the tile where it rocked back and forth. Tilly nudged it with her toe and it rolled under a chair, that much closer to being lost. To oblivion! Tilly thought in the voice she reserved in her head for the Space Cowboy. Then, just to be funny, blurp she thought in the voice she reserved for the demon X.
“I would want them to exaggerate my legs,” Tilly finally said. “Not my pants, just my legs.” She imagined the statue of herself streaked green with corrosion and soaring up from its concrete plinth to an improbable height. No one would be able to see anything of her but her feet, her ankles, her shins. They would have to read her plaque to see who she was or what she had done. Matilda Beaumont, 1980— . The rest was less conducive to the plaque format. She thought a lot, it might say. Or: She was a help. She would pose for the sculpture in shorts, something cut close to the thigh so no one below could look up and catch a glimpse of her monolithic panties.
“That’s very interesting,” said Lou Blevins. He had stopped tapping and was looking at her directly, the blender forgotten. “I mean it, that’s fascinating. Not what I would have expected from X, of course, but maybe this isn’t its part anymore. Maybe it’s been someone else all along. Tressa or the Animal-Wife. That would certainly solve a lot of structural problems for me, a lot of tempo problems.” He was excited and tugged on his earlobe the way he did when he was deep in thought as if he wanted to give the thought a little more room in his skull, get it some air. Lou Blevins was nice to her. He kissed her, held on to her waist for a moment longer than he had to, but then he went out the door to his workshop and she was alone, all her work done, the house quiet. More frequently than not, it was like this. She decided to go for a drive.
***
When Tilly opened her eyes she was upside down. Something had run across the road. Trundled. Pooted.
Across the road, something had blurped.
The windshield was broken or the trees beyond the windshield were broken. Tilly blinked. Her upper lip was resting against her nose. Something dangled past her face and it was her arm.
“Is this a horrible wreck?” Tilly thought.
“It is,” said a voice. An arm went across her shoulder. A hand fumbled at her hip. “You’re all kinds of fucked up,” said the voice and then Tilly dropped and something crunched. The trees swerved until sky showed through their branches.
When Tilly opened her eyes she was propped up in a chair. Nothing was upside down, though one of her eyes seemed to be seeing what it was seeing at a slightly different height than the other eye. She blinked, but it didn’t help.
The chair was a recliner. Tilly’s legs were up, her torso reclined. Something was on her head, maybe a hat?, and across the room two women were sitting at a card table, smoking and looking at her.
“Is she awake?” one woman asked. She was small and ferrety. A ferrety face. Red hair. Freckles. Buck teeth.
The other woman was a silver shimmer with very large breasts. She was wearing a t-shirt which, when she stood up to stretch, revealed itself to be an advertisement for mathematics? Add It Up! said the shirt. It was amazing what you could notice when your eyes saw things twice. Tilly’s lower eye read the shirt. Tilly’s upper eye drifted across the wood paneling on the walls, the dinette behind the two women, the back of someone else’s head sitting at the dinette, the hovering smoke below the ceiling light, the accumulation of sofa cushions, Styrofoam cups, crushed cans, stripped wires, pages and pages and pages of what was once a book that piled up in the room’s corners. She reached up to adjust the hat which was starting to slide onto her forehead.
“Nuh-unh,” said the silver shimmer. She crossed the small room quickly and rapped the back of Tilly’s hand. “Don’t touch.”
A time when everything slid downward. The walls. The smoke. Ferrety said, “Tressa, make up your mind.”
Silver shimmer. The breasts so close to her mouth they might smother her as smoke drifted down from over her head. Add It Up! Add It Up!
“Come here,” said someone. “Come over here.”
On the stovetop, a teakettle blasted its whistle blast. From the dinette, he rose—too tall, a-jangle.
At his hip, a ray-gun. On his heels, rooster spurs.
“Once, in the dark, you thought you saw something you couldn’t have seen. When you looked again, it was gone, but your life was forever changed. You understand?”
“That ain’t right,” said Ferrety. “It’s the middle of the fucking day. She ain’t like glimpsing nothing. Full blown looking. An eye-full.”
“Once, in the middle of the fucking day, you saw something you couldn’t have seen. You crashed your car. You smashed your head in. Now, in the middle of your life is a seam which will forever unravel. Is that better or would you like me to do it again?”
She was in a trailer. She was in a space ship. The man who had risen from the dinette stood in the middle of the room and pissed. Out of the fly of his weather-worn jeans, ran a long hose pulsing with multi-colored lights. He swung it around. Urine splashed on the walls, on her face, ran into her mouth and tasted like salt and iron. The tea whistle blasted. Underneath that sound, there was a noise like the blatting of trombones. The foul spout of the jug, maybe, just outside the window.
“Oh, please don’t. Oh, keep it away.”
“What’s she saying, Tressa?” Ferrety asked. “She’s moving her mouth. I know she’s saying something.”
Just outside a demon waited. Always, just outside, waited the demon X.
To Oblivion!
“Once—make up your mind—you saw something—make up your mind—and it was the demon already in your life.”
“Anybody want some?” asked the Space Cowboy. “Would anybody like some tea?”
***
She woke up and was upside down. Blinked: the world was right again, each eye seeing only the thing it was looking at. She was in a room, hospital room, beige and full of quiet whirring. Corner-mounted television tuned to a shopping network, bunch of balloons rubbing against the ceiling. Turning her head just slightly caused maximum pain and some grinding in the neck and a feeling again like she was wearing a hat. Lou Blevins was in an armchair next to her bed, tuned to the television. “Can you believe this stain?” the television shouted. She lifted her hand sprouting tubes and touched the swathes of gauze above her eyebrows. Some grinding again. She made a noise.
“Matilda!” said Lou Blevins, leaning suddenly toward her face. “Matilda, you’re awake.”
Buttons were pushed. Here came the nurse. Lou Blevins muted the television but on it the host jumped up and down on a shirt, on some flowers, on a tomato. “$19.99” flashed on the television screen. The nurse looked deeply into her face, into her eyes, and smiled. To get to her face and eyes the nurse had to crane her body awkwardly over the bed, but this, Matlida thought, was the nature of both kindness and efficiency. “Order now,” the television commanded.
“Hello,” said the nurse. “Can you tell me your name?” She could see the nurse’s words on her lips and in her eyes, which were brown and lively, but what she heard was the blurp of trombones.
“Matilda,” said Lou Blevins, encouragingly. “Matilda,” he coaxed. “Matilda. Matilda. Matil—”
***
When she woke up, everything was okay and her name was Matilda. Lou Blevins was not there, but would be back during visiting hours.
The nurse told her this. The nurse rubbed a circle on the back of her hand with a kind and efficient thumb and asked her if she could feel it.
The doctor came into the room and said: “ intercranial hemorrhage” and “diffuse axonal injury” and “maybe.”
The nurse said: “car accident” and “do you want some water?”
A few hours later, Lou Blevins came in and said, “Matilda, Matilda, Matilda.” She understood something which was that she would never be Tilly again. She could move her feet. This was “unexpected” and “a good sign.” Something was under the bed. She had seen it blunder across the room just as Lou Blevins opened the door.
Lou Blevins said, “You were in an accident. You hit a tree. Some people heard it happen and came out and got you out because they thought the car would catch fire. They put you in their trailer and called an ambulance. Real hillbillies. Out in the middle of nowhere. It took forty minutes for the ambulance to get to you. Don’t worry, Matilda. I’ll take you home as soon as you get better. I’ll take care of you.”
Lou Blevins had tears running down either side of his splendid nose. They caught in the corners of his mouth and he scrubbed them away like a child. Matilda thought he looked terrible. Too orange, like somebody who has eaten only carrots for days, but maybe it was the light.
Woman with Traumatic Brain Injury, thought Matilda. Woman with Mouth Filled with Blood. Woman with a Demon Hiding under Her Bed.
Matilda was in the hospital for two months. There was another surgery to repair a bleed, there was waiting for the swelling to go down. She was moved to a rehabilitation ward. A physical therapist flexed her feet and bent her knees up toward her chest. An occupational therapist helped her hold an empty spoon and guide it toward her mouth. After a while, she was wheeled to a room set up like a children’s gym and she practiced walking between balance bars and throwing a soft foam ball. A social worker sat down with her and Lou Blevins and talked about in-home mobility, social security disability payments, community service organizations for meaningful engagement in future life.
Woman Eating Hard-Boiled Egg, thought Matilda as she ate a hard-boiled egg. Woman Standing in the Hallway, as she stood in the hallway with Lou Blevins holding her arm.
Through it all, Lou Blevins came to visit twice a day, then once, after he took a job with the city Parks Department to help with the bills. “I trim the hedges around the rec buildings,” said Lou Blevins, leaning back in her in-suite armchair and propping his new work boots up on the foot of her bed. “You’d never believe what all I find in there. Toys, trash, ripped up letters, every kind of fecal matter you can imagine. Yesterday, I found a coffee cup with a human turd inside,” said Lou Blevins, shaking his head in wonder. “I keep thinking: before or after, before or after. Before or after keeps running through my mind.”
Matilda grew tired easily and sometimes went to sleep while Lou Blevins was talking to her, or helping her eat, or even holding her upright on the toilet where she often grew dizzy and once fell. He did not seem to mind. On he went: talking, spooning, rubbing her back. “Thank you,” Matilda tried to say, but it came out as “Fuckmouth,” which was a side effect of her injury they were both reassured. Also, through it all, the demon X blooted sinisterly down the halls, ducked behind open doors, hid under the fringe of bed clothes, leered over her shoulder in mirrors only to disappear when she completed the laborious maneuvers required for her to turn around.
“Visual hallucinations are not uncommon with injuries of this nature,” said a doctor when she described, very vaguely, seeing something which she wasn’t supposed to see. “You’re making remarkable progress. Your prognosis is exceptionally positive, given your injuries.”
“What does it look like?” asked Lou Blevins, scratching his chin over which a beard was spreading. They were in the therapy pool. Lou Blevins seemed to have bought his suit new for the occasion. Water filled the pockets of his trunks and billowed around his hibiscus-patterned thighs as he paced backward in front of her. The price tag floated beside him, steadily disintegrating. Matilda was in her old blue suit which Lou Blevins had brought from home. It fit her strangely now, though her body had not changed at all from the neck down. Same breasts, same belly. Same thighs, knees, ankles, toes. Her hair was starting to grow back. The nurse combed it gently over the ridges and still somewhat smushy valleys of her skull. “This will all even out,” the nurse said, holding up a mirror. “Pretty soon, you’ll be good as new.”
Matilda thought of herself new. A pink baby between her mother’s legs, skull pressed into a cone, blood streaked over her scrunched shut eyes and her wide, taut, howling mouth. She had watched enough episodes of I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant during her bed-bound down hours to know exactly what new looked like. “She’s so beautiful,” the mothers always said. “Blurp,” said the demon X, reclining next to her on the nursing cart that had previous conveyed her meal. When she looked at it from the corner of her eyes she could see it clearly. Straight on made it shy and it would booble right out of view, pumping its skinny arms for extra velocity as it rocked away under the bed.
“Coke-bottle shaped,” said Matilda. “Sometimes. Sometimes like an onion.”
“Is it a cat?” asked Lou Blevins. Water dripped off the tip of his nose. It was hot in the pool, therapeutic. Matilda trudged her feet forward thinking Forward Forward encouragingly at her brain, which did not always anymore know what that was. She considered the question. A cat was . . . animal, could move . . . . She thought: delicate. She thought: makes a sound like Shazam.
“Is a cat shaped like an onion?” Matilda asked. She meant this as a sincere question, but Lou Blevins ducked his head and laughed in the direction of the ripples emanating from his torso.
“I gotcha,” he said. “I take your point.”
Cat is . . . thought Matilda. She watched as the demon X lost its balance on the far side of the little pool where it was hunkered under the wheelchair lift. It tipped into the water with an outlandish splash and sank to the bottom, its arms and legs flailing as it rocked upside then down through the too-blue water. Matilda felt some concern for it. Would it drown? Would it crack? Would it disintegrate into a gritty slick of clay on the bottom? Would it be sucked into the filters or the drain? Forward, Matilda remembered to tell her leg and Forward her leg went.
“Wow!” said Lou Blevins. “Great!”
The demon X did not disintegrate or drown and instead sat on the bottom of the pool, sulking. Matilda could not be sure from that distance but thought perhaps it stuck out its tongue. A cat, she remembered, had fur and this did not. Unless it was a naked cat, and some were, were they not? Forward! went her other leg and Lou Blevins clapped his hands. Sometimes, out of the corner of her eye, Matilda caught the demon X asleep. It liked the windowsill in her room where it squatted in the pale hospital sun, its legs tucked up at its sides like a grasshopper’s. Asleep, the demon was not so alarming. Its eyes rolled humorously under its thin yellow eyelids. Its horrible ears were almost cute. What did it want, this demon? How did its way of wanting coincide with her own way of wanting? Matilda understood that the accident had not changed who she was, but how she was. This is what one of the doctors or nurses or therapists or Lou Blevinses explained to her. Of course not, Matilda thought. The accident was only a symptom. It was a postscript.
“I just thought maybe a cat would mean something,” said Lou Blevins, pacing ever backwards. “They have a long symbolic history in the human subconscious.”
Matilda reinhabited the moment before the accident: radio on in the car, shadow and sunlight striping the road as on either side she passed pine tree, pine tree, pine tree. She was doing that thing she liked to do where she looked through the trees for what was behind them. She was driving a little too fast. Out of the trees, on the left-hand side of the road, a groundhog, or maybe a beaver? She squinted; she was already slowing down in case it unpredictably darted. When the demon labored forward, when she saw what it really was, when it looked back at her and widened its human-esque eyes, when one song on the radio stopped and another began, when she felt all her blood, all at once, start to buzz in her veins as if a magnet were calling to it all its filings… after that, Tilly didn’t remember. Of course it was the demon X that had changed her. When she swerved off the road, Tilly suspected this had not been in an effort to avoid its bumbling, blundering, impossible body as it passed in front of her, but in an effort to hit it. To erase it. To wipe it off the map.
“Instead I imbedded it into my unravelling valley,” she said to Lou Blevins who chose not to hear her. “Ever after,” she practically shouted, “ it pierces my anonymity with its specific regard.”
Bubbles rose from the spot where the demon X squatted under the water. Lou Blevins smiled encouragingly at her, his lips stretched tight over teeth that were appealingly crooked, contentedly yellow, endearingly exposed. Matilda drifted forward into his arms and he caught her.
“I have made up my mind,” he said. “Right at the start of all this.” Lou Blevins kissed her carefully on the forehead, at the hairline where one of her lacerations had healed into a tight, pink scar. “I am so grateful for the chance to know what I want,” said Lou Blevins into Matilda’s damp hair. “I am so grateful to put myself down and walk away.”
***
Matilda was back home for several months before she and Lou Blevins had sex. The logistics of her reinstatement exhausted both of them. For many weeks in a row, Lou Blevins helped Matilda into bed and then fell asleep himself on the couch, in an armchair, once in the bath, where she found him in the middle of the night and thought he might be a hallucination.
“Still here?” she asked, prodding him with her electric toothbrush.
“Ouch,” he said, then, “ouch,” again until she was satisfied.
During the day, Lou Blevins went to work at the area parks and Matilda waited for him to come home on his break and help her fix lunch, help her eat lunch, help her put the dishes away after lunch was over. When Lou Blevins was not home, Matilda practiced walking up and down the hall, turning the volume down on the stereo, saying her own name while she looked at herself in the mirror.
The nurse at the hospital had been both correct and incorrect. The hair had grown back in the same generally taffy-colored waves Matilda had possessed before the accident, but, though her hair was thick and clean and shiny, it covered nothing. Clearly, Matilda’s head was a different shape than the heads of most other people. Clearly, one of her eyes had ended up slightly askew in its socket, though which one was hard to answer. When Matilda first returned home, her inbox had been full of well-wishing emails from bbinzayed20, mmkaskavitch and elizabeth.turturo@hotmail. com—lippy265 was silent on the matter—but Matilda could not return to work, could not look at the computer screen for long stretches of time without pain, could not make her fingers peck the buttons which would accrue to language and send all of her intents whizzing into the stratosphere. Lou Blevins helped her type her resignation letter. A.T.U. would provide her with health insurance for the next eighteen months, but after that she was on her own.
“You’re eligible for Medicaid,” said Lou Blevins. “Or we could get married.” They were sitting on the couch watching television. Matilda was wearing sunglasses which she had been given at the hospital to reduce the glare. They were the kind of glasses the hospital also gave people who were recovering from cataract surgery and Matilda thought they made her look like she was wearing a blast shield on her space helmet, lowered just prior to skimming the corona of a star. In this case, however, the space helmet was her skull and the star either the television screen or Lou Blevins himself, who certainly seemed the require skimming. He was eating potato chips and wiggling his toes contentedly in the pile of the carpet.
“Think about it,” Lou Belvins said. “I’ve got a pension now.” He popped a chip into his mouth and crunched. He licked the salt off his fingers. Through the sunglasses, Lou Blevins appeared in shades of green and umber. When he turned to smile at her, his teeth flashed an arc of sepia.
“I’m changing my answer,” Matilda said. “It would still be my legs, but the statue wouldn’t be wearing shorts.”
“Oh yeah?” said Lou Blevins. She could see he had no idea what she was talking about. He held the potato chip bag out to her and shook it, as if to entice.
“I’d wear a skirt,” Matilda said, ignoring the chips. “I’d wear a skirt with nothing else on at all. When people looked up, they’d see only my naked vagina, freshly shaven, bald as a baby’s vagina. They’d put the statue in a public park, near the swing sets. You’d be able to tell a lot about a person by how high they tried to swing.”
“Neat,” said Lou Blevins. He tossed the chip bag onto the coffee table and lifted Matilda’s hand into his own. “It’s good to have goals.” They sat together and watched a show where people got drunk on boats and then the police arrested them. “My only crime is loving too much,” hollered a woman with an American flag bikini and a tattoo of a computer circuit board on her shoulder.
“An unanswered question remains open,” said Lou Blevins as the police, who were also on boats, wrestled the woman into their hull.
“No,” said Matilda, but she was not totally sure that was what her mouth said. Either way, Lou Blevins looked unperturbed. He ate the rest of the chips. Later, he put her to bed.
Looking into the mirror, Matilda thought that her face looked as if someone had placed a mask of exactly her features over her real features. This was the main difference—an invisible mask. The mask was made of a clever material, like Rice Krispies or recycled tires, which perfectly mimicked human skin so that the viewer would be deeply shocked and destabilized when its true nature was revealed. She told this to Lou Blevins who nibbled on her earlobe. “Doesn’t taste like tires,” he said, sweetly. “Or Rice Krispies either, come to think.” That very day, Lou Blevins had come home on his lunch break and gone back out to his composition shed for the first time since Matilda had been back from the hospital, probably the first time since the accident. She sat at the kitchen table and listened to tinkling noises, then hooting noises, then a run of truly beautiful and ominous diminished 5ths which sounded as if they were being played on the tines of a giant fork. Those made her feel like a snake shivering out of her skin. She imagined leaving her skin behind, the vacant bubble that had once encased her eye milky in the dim kitchen light. Hoot hoot hoot went Lou Blevins in the shed.
That night, Lou Blevins lay down beside her on the bed and she told him how the music had made her feel. She rolled so her cheek rested on Lou Blevins’ shoulder and marveled, briefly, at the lack of pain or dizziness this movement engendered. “A snake, huh?” said Lou Blevins, tugging on the beard which he had kept. He sounded tired. He looked reduced. He smelled appealingly like pine mulch and sweat and a cloud of green gnats whirring up out of the fresh-cut grass. “Sure. I guess I can see that.”
“If they were going to erect some sort of monument to you, which feature would you like them to flatteringly exaggerate?” she asked Lou Blevins.
“Who is they?” he answered after a few moments of thought. “I think my answer would depend a lot on who they are.”
But Matilda had already decided for him. It would be his nose, of course. Whoever they were would erect the statue of Lou Blevins across the park from the statue of herself. His would be on an island in the middle of the duck pond where, the nose proving too heavy to be hoisted aloft, he would curl with his chin resting in a landscape of blooming azalea and melancholy eyes forever yearning for a glimpse up her skirt. The nose itself would be so noble, so quixotic, so appealingly sniffy, that local teenagers from miles around would wade, or swim, or even row to the island to make out in the cavern of his nostrils. Some of them, seeking greater privacy, might even journey up the nasal passage where they would helix around each other, panting in the perfect secrecy of Lou Blevins’ frontal sinus. From there, coitus effectus, one of them might split off and explore further on their own—through the tear ducts or along the shallow pathways of the optic nerve—until they found themselves among the coils of Lou Blevins’ brain, like a teenage tapeworm holding up its cell phone to cast a blue glow over the view. The park would have to be renamed Lovers’ Green, both for the actual lovers and for the lovelorn statues. One too top-heavy to lift its aching head, one too stork-limbed to bend its stiff knees.
“Thank god we’re not statues,” Matilda said.
“What?” said Lou Blevins
“I want to be on top,” she concluded, which was not quite what she meant, but close enough. She rocked herself to the side and then rolled all the way on top of Lou Blevins. In between her legs—just exactly the same as they had been before—she felt him instantly harden through the thin fabric of his boxers. She bowed her after head and kissed him on his cheeks. Nothing had changed. The pillow beneath his head was white and plump and softly rectangular. His expression behind his face was uncertain.
“Are you sure?” Lou Blevins asked.
Of course, Lou Blevins had changed tremendously. This had happened sometime in her coma or sometime during one of her surgeries. Sometime when she had not been available for comment. When Matilda awoke into her body in the hospital, it had been to an entirely changed Lou Blevins who wore on top of his Musical Genius mask a Selfless Caregiver mask and who was, at that very moment, sliding atop them both the mask of Conscientious Lover. Abhorrent, Matilda thought. Gross.
But, on the other hand, why should she care about Lou Blevins’ masks? Was this experience in her life—the exposure of the cleft that was literally the place where a wedge of her car’s windshield had been driven through her skull into the interstellar aspic of her brain, but was really only a clumsy symbol for what had always been a gulf in her identity, a chasm in her self-reliance, a rift in her inner being particularly vulnerable to colonization by non-native species—going to be about how it had affected Lou Blevins? Once she had admired Lou Blevins, she remembered that. Now, she supposed, she needed him, but in between these two poles a gently glowing crystal of antimatter shed its marine light on the vastness of space that surrounded them both. Fuel for the warp drive, atomic sustenance that kept the life systems running…. Matilda had watched enough sci-fi TV to know that when matter and antimatter collide the resulting annihilation is love. Underneath her, Lou Blevins’ homely, eager maskface assembled itself into love. Above him, Matilda consulted all the frames of reference available to her—both what she had always known and the void that had been revealed by the intervention of the demon X—and came to a decision.
“Help me off with this thing,” Matilda answered as she slid her nightgown up her hips, over her belly. It stuck at her breasts, but, with Lou Blevins’ help, she tugged it over and free and floating down beside them like a cosmic sail blown clear of its satellite, becoming once again only a shape.
Afterwards, Matilda’s body glowed and hummed. Lou Blevins slept in their bed, smiling. Behind the glass of their bedroom’s French doors, the demon X burbled and nodded, rocking its stubby body back and forth maybe in parody, Matilda thought, but curious, tentative, mimicking, not mocking. “Who cares about you, anyway?” Matilda said to it, feeling mean and free. “You stub. You stump. You jug.”
Then, in an excess of cruelty, she continued, “You mug, you hump, you pot. You sweet. You love. You happy end.”
The demon X seemed to hang its head. Maybe it was a cat, Matilda thought. Lou Blevins groaned in his sleep. His breath whistling past his teeth had a musical timbre to it, another part coming into play perhaps? Who, after all, was the third woman in the love triangle with the Space Cowboy? Lou Blevins had never mentioned that character’s name and, as was the case with many other things in their relationship, Matilda had never asked. Unlike air or water, blood or her own sincere Let’s Pretend, the thing about space was that it did not rush in to fill a void. It was the void, punctuated by stubborn, pushy, irritating specks of non-void around which it must suddenly understand itself.
“If I were space,” Matilda said to the demon X as she swung her legs out of bed and teetered over to where it crouched, “I would really resent not-space.” She put her back against the wall and slid down until she was sitting beside the demon which had wedged itself behind the door at her approach. With no room to rock or flail its arms, the demon looked apprehensive, maybe even scared. It rolled its extravagant eyes at her. It wiggled its nearest ear.
“Planets and such,” Matilda continued. She crooked a finger and extended it carefully. She made soothing noises with her tongue. The demon X weebled slightly toward her. It weebled slightly away. A few weeks after her release from the hospital Matilda had convinced Lou Blevins to drive her out to the scene of the accident. “I think it would help my memory,” she said as he dithered in the driveway, keys in his hand. “Maybe it would even help with the, you know, hallucinations,” she continued, pulling out her trump card.
And so he had taken her—down the long piney road to the crushed guard rail and thick pine tree smashed by her car into a bow. Most of the debris had been cleared by time and rain and passing tires, but there was still a froth of safety glass washed up around the roots of roadside weeds. No tire marks to speak of. She had been speeding up it appeared, not slowing down.
Matilda leaned against Lou Blevins’ car and listened to the woods around them as the insect song built and broke, the trees rustled, something flumped through the branches, no cars passed. She could see the spot where she remembered the demon X first breaking cover but—even though she poked around in the tall grass and beds of tough aster and nodding ragwort—she could not discover what it might have been travelling from or, even, what toward.
“Can we go to the trailer?” Matilda asked Lou Blevins. The demon X was crouched under the passenger glovebox. It had spent the ride huddled miserably between her feet, blurping in protest at every bump and turn. It would not come out now, though she had left the door open for it. It seemed there was nothing here it remembered fondly. When Matilda went around to the back of the car to fetch her walker from the trunk, she saw that the demon X had closed its eyes and was potentially even asleep. A yellow butterfly was landing over and over again on the windshield. It cast a doddering butterfly shadow inside the car, big when it landed and spread its wings, small when it fluttered up and around for another approach. “Sweet,” Matilda said under her breath, “Singular.” But the demon X ignored all such imprecations. Its eyes were squinched too tightly shut for true sleep, but still it faked a little snore. “Okay?” Lou Blevins asked. “Watch the gravel here. It’s loose.”
The trailer was at the end of a dirt rut that first was gravel-strewn and then just mud and grass and flowers growing high on the central hump. The trailer itself looked abandoned. There were no cars parked around it; no mail in the box at the head of the drive; no wires travelling in or out of the structure to carry electricity, or information, or gamma radiation to or fro. “Did they move away?” Matilda asked, but Lou Blevins didn’t know.
Then again, maybe this was the way the trailer always looked. Matilda certainly wasn’t a credible witness. Lou Blevins had never been there before. The demon X was the only one who could tell her whether this was abandonment or camouflage, but it was sweltering in the car, pretending to snore, or, maybe, rummaging in her purse where she had packed a little snack for the drive. Matilda imagined the demon X with a guilty ring of Cheeto dust around its wide-lipped mouth. She imagined it whistling in feigned slumber while chocolate slowly melted in the crevices between its toes. There was nothing for it. Matilda thumped up the steps and knocked on the door.
When no one answered, Matilda told Lou Blevins to knock the door down. “Nope,” he said, but he did twist the handle. The door swung open easily and a waft of stale, yellow air blew past their faces to disseminate beneath the pines. The trailer was abandoned. Full of garbage, stripped of furniture. The card table Matilda remembered was still there, tipped on its side, but no chairs, no recliner, no teapot, not even a stove—just a grease- caked socket left in the wall from which it had been pulled like a tooth. She did find a drift of Styrofoam cups burned into lacework by someone’s cigarette butt, and Lou Blevins pulled a garden hose flayed open like the husk of a snake up from under a stack of tattered home gardening magazines. “Weird,” he said as Matilda inspected the hose for circuits or buttons or flashing lights, but clearly Lou Blevins was bored. Matilda herself, pausing to listen to a breeze yawning through the trailer’s loose window screen, had to admit she too was a little bored. The day was hot, the trailer was close and dark. There was nothing to find but arcane garbage. There were no clues left behind.
“I guess they beamed up,” Matilda said, and Lou Blevins laughed and laughed. Before they left, Matilda picked up a jelly jar that was laying on its side in the sink and had Lou Blevins fill it with purple aster, ox-eye daisy, buttercup, and tickseed, picked at her direction, as she wrestled the walker back up the humped and rutted path to the road. When she had gotten settled back in the car, she put the jelly jar at her feet as an offering to the demon X, but it still wouldn’t open its eyes. The whole way home the flowers pressed up against the demon’s snout, fluttering in its wheezing breath. The jar made a tiny tinking sound where it clinked against the demon’s hard hide.
“Disappointed?” Lou Blevins asked.
“Maybe,” Matilda answered. She couldn’t name the feeling she was feeling. She nudged the demon with her foot and it grunted.
“What did you say?” Lou Blevins asked, peering down at the phone he had balanced on his thigh. “Sorry, I didn’t hear you. I think we’re lost.”
Now, in her own bedroom, Matilda thought she was feeling that same feeling, whatever it was. This close, the demon X’s skin looked less like hardened clay and more like a tough leather stretched over some unimaginable architecture of bone. It was making a nervous sound, a greeting deep in its gullet. It was emitting a faint smell—just a little bit like pine sap, just a little bit like burned toast. “Imagine how nice it was to be space before not-space came along,” Matilda said in her softest, soothingest Young Mother Whispering Over Infant’s Nap voice. “To be so alone you didn’t even have to have the concept of alone. So alone you didn’t even need to have the concept of yourself.” She stretched her hand through the final gap between them and her crooked and gentle finger stroked once, twice, the demon X’s cheek. It was chilly, gritty, just slightly pulsing with breath. It closed its eyes as if it were experiencing pain or ecstasy or indigestion. Always hard to tell with the demon. It was not made to communicate. It was not meant to impart.
“This isn’t a metaphor for anything, I hope you know,” said Matilda in her own voice again. “We’re just talking here. Throwing around ideas. I don’t blame you for having somewhere to be.” She paused and considered a minute, her finger stilled on the demon’s cheek, and it opened its nearest eye again, juddered forward and nudged her hand insistently.
“I don’t blame myself for trying to smash you either,” she went on. “Basically, we are both covered in a blanket of disdain. It’s the void trying to crush us, but even if it succeeds it won’t be able to forget the energy it had to expend to get rid of us. There’ll be particles of us hanging around forever. Interstellar dust, ice, some kind of shine.”
Lou Blevins horked in his sleep and rolled over. The demon X butted her hand with its forehead. It rocked forward until its sphinctery little spout was resting against her thigh. “You and me,” Matilda said. “Accidental space grit.” She rubbed the part of the demon X that could be considered its back. She smoothed the part that could be considered its skull. “Of course,” she said, “you have to have some imagination about these things.” The sound the demon X was making and the vibration that accompanied the sound, even its scent which was now like camphor or wide open space or a storm that was coming but still far away, were so soothing that Matilda felt her muscles relax, her head loll, her eyes roll just a little back into the dented pot of her skull. “No one really knows what mask space wears when it is forced to confront not-space,” she murmured, more than half asleep. “Angry Woman Taking It Out on the Merchandise, maybe. Vengeful Wind Flailing Everything With Equal Frenzy, likely as not.”
In the last seconds before she fell asleep, Matilda felt the demon X clamber up onto her lap. When Lou Blevins woke her in the morning, the demon was gone, but there was a thin film of dust across her naked thighs where it had rested. When she pointed this out to Lou Blevins he made her a bagel and promised to sweep the floors. When he left that morning for work, she listened to the empty house around her and wondered whether she had done something right or something wrong.
In the days and weeks that followed, the demon did not return, but something else visited her that had no name or shape or smell. She sensed it in the moments just before she fell asleep—a dark rushing, a whelming as thick as blood or tar that came so close to her surface it could almost, almost look out. And if it seemed unfair that she should be so doubly visited, at least she felt certain she would not be doubly abandoned. “What is it now inside of me?” Matilda said into the comfortable dark of her shared room. Lou Blevins stirred and tucked her against his side. But even there, even under the wing, under the weight, under the love, under the heat, under the under, safe as a seed—what was inside her rushed up so quickly she felt she would one day turn inside out and have to live that way, whatever way that was, while Lou Blevins still coddled and cooed, while the dark rushing thing went on in its inscrutable fashion.
“Oh,” Matilda thought, already mostly sleeping, “ if only I were a little comet or a frozen moon.” She turned to Lou Blevins and pressed up against his heavy body, his heartbeat against her cheek, his breath on her brow. “Oh, if only we were a man and a woman holding between us the body of our darling demon as our capsule tumbles and roves.”
But then there would be the suns to worry about, Matilda considered. The pull of opposing gravities, the obstacles of Oort clouds, the ravages of the void stalking after them as shapeless as blood or tar, vengeful as the house slipper slapped down upon the little bug. There was no, there was none, escape? What was this thing inside her that would force her apart?
“Shush,” said Lou Blevins, speaking out of his own dreaming. “No more.”