She sets the tray down on the bed and points at the box. “What’s this?” she asks, even though it’s clearly marked and she’s seen it a hundred times before. Really, she is the most infuriating creature. Arthur doesn’t know what he’s gotten himself into.
But I smile and make my voice as sugary as the icing on the tacky wedding cake she’s sure to have on Saturday. “A wedding gift,” I say. “I know how you’ve always wanted these.” She gets that look on her face that I’ve always hated, a sort of tentative, frightened joy, like a dog taking meat from a hand she knows might hit her.
“Arlette, really?” she says. She sounds like she might cry, and I feel like pinching her.
“Well, I expect I’ll be coming over to your house for Christmas from now on. It just makes sense.”
“Oh, Arlette!” she cries and throws her arms around me, nearly upsetting my bowl of broth. “That’s why you made me come over here today, isn’t it? You’re the sweetest sister a person could have!”
“You always could see right through me,” I say and bite into a saltine.
I watch as she picks the box up to carry it down to her car, chattering away about some nonsense or other. I think about the picture of Arthur hidden deep inside, his lying face wrapped around a ruined angel. She’ll find it at Christmastime, if her eyes are sharp. And if anything should happen before then, I can hardly be held accountable. I’ve done everything I can.
And if, God forbid, anything should happen before then, I’m prepared to take the situation into my own hands. I have no doubt that, with a little bit of guidance, Arthur could become the kind of husband I deserve.
A LIFE IN FICTIONS
Kat Howard
HE WROTE ME INTO A STORY AGAIN.
I told him to stop doing that, after we broke up. In fact, it was one of the reasons that we broke up. I mean, being a muse is all well and good until you actually become one.
The first time it happened, I was flattered. And it wasn’t like my normal life was so great that I was going to miss it, you know? So getting pulled into that world—a world he had written just for me, where I was the everything, the unattainable, the ideal—it was pretty powerful.
When he finished the story, and I came back to the real world, the first thing I did was screw him until my thighs ached. It was our first time together. He said it was the best sex of his life.
When I asked him if someone had ever fallen into a story that he had written before, he said not that he knew of. Oh, sure, he had based characters on people he knew, stolen little bits of their lives. A gesture, a phrase, a particular color of eye or way of walking. The petty thievery all writers commit.
I asked what he had done differently this time.
“I was falling in love with you, I guess. You were all I could think of. So when I wrote Marah, there you were in my head. Always.”
I hadn’t fallen into the story right away, and I didn’t know what happened in the parts where Marah didn’t appear. Reading the finished draft was this weird mix of déjà vu and mystery.
Apparently inspired by my real-world sexual abandon, the next thing he wrote me into was an erotic novella. Ali was a great deal more flexible than I was, both physically and in her gender preferences.
I really enjoyed that story, but one night I tried something in bed that Ali thought was fun but that he thought was beyond kinky. After that, the only sex scenes he wrote me into involved oral sex.
Men can be so predictable, even when they are literary geniuses.
Maybe especially then.
The next time he wrote me into something, I lost my job. It was a novel, what he was working on then, and when he was writing Nora, I would just disappear from my life as soon as he picked up his pen. For days, or even weeks at a time, when the writing was going well.
He said he didn’t know what happened to me during those times. He would go to my apartment, check on things, water my plants. When he remembered. When he wasn’t so deep in the writing that nothing outside registered.
I was always in his head during those times, he said, at the edges of his thoughts. As if that should reassure me.
It happened faster. He would begin to write, and I would be in the story, and I would stay there until he was finished.
The more I lived in his writing, the less I lived in the real world, and the less I remembered what it was like to live in the real world, as a real person, as me.
When the writing was going well, I would be surrounded by the comfortable, warm feeling that someone else knew what was going on, was making all the decisions, was the safety net under the high wire. Everything was gauzy, soft focus, fuzzed at the periphery.
I could have an adventure without worrying about the consequences. After all, I was always at the edges of his thoughts.
Until the day I wasn’t. Everything froze, and I was in a cold, white room, full of statues of the people I had been talking to.
I walked from person to person, attempting to start conversations, but nothing happened. Walked around the room again, looking for a way out, but there was nothing. Solid white walls, floor, ceiling. It was a large room, but I could feel the pressure of the walls against my skin.
I walked to the center of the room, and sat, cross-legged, on the floor. Waiting.
Have you ever had your mind go blank? That space between one thought and the next when your brain is just white noise, when there is not one thought in your head—do you remember that feeling?
Imagine that absence extending forever. There’s no way of escaping it, because you don’t know—not don’t remember, don’t know—what you were thinking about before your brain blanked out, and so you don’t know what to do to get it started again. There’s just nothing. Silence. White.
And there’s no time. No way of telling how long you sit in that vast, claustrophobic white room, becoming increasingly less.
I never was able to figure out how long I waited there. But suddenly I was in a room I had never seen before, back in the real world, and he was there.
There were wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, and gray threading through his hair. Writer’s block, he explained to me. He had tried to write through it, work on other projects, but nothing helped. Finally, that morning, he had abandoned the novel as unworkable.
I asked if he had tried to bring me back, while he was stuck.
He hadn’t really thought of it.
That was when I broke up with him.
He had, I discovered, become quite successful while I was away. A critical darling, praised especially for the complexity, the reality, of his female characters.
Speaking of Marah in an interview, he described her as his one lost love. The interviewer found it romantic.
I found the interviewer tiresome. Being lost was not romantic at all.
Parts of me stayed lost, or got covered over by all those other women I had been for him. Sure, they were me, but they were his view of me, exaggerated, slightly shifted, truth told slanted.
I would turn up a song on the radio, then remember that it was Ali who liked gypsy punk. I abandoned my favorite bakery for two weeks when I convinced myself that I had Fiona’s gluten allergy.
For three months, I thought my name was Marah.
During all of this, there were intervals of normalcy. But I still felt the tugs as he borrowed little pieces of me for his fictions. I would lose my favorite perfume, or the memory of the first time I had my heart broken. Tiny bits of myself that would slough away, painlessly. Sometimes they would return when he wrote “The End.” More often, they did not.
I reminded him that he had promised not to write about me anymore. He assured me he hadn’t meant to. It was just bits, here and there. He’d be more careful. And really, I ought to be flattered.
But then a week of my life disappeared. I loved that short story, and Imogen was an amazing character, the kind of woman I wished I was. That wasn’t the point.
The point was, he had stolen me from myself aga
in. I was just gone, and I didn’t know where I went. And there were more things about myself that I had forgotten. Was green really my favorite color?
I flicked on the computer, started typing madly. Everything I could remember about myself. But when I looked over the file, there were gaps that I knew I had once remembered, and duplications of events.
Panting, I stripped off my clothing and stared at myself, hoping that my body was more real than my mind. But was that scar on my knee from falling off my bike when I was twelve, or from a too-sharp rock at the beach when I was seventeen. Was that really how I waved hello? Would I cry at a time like this?
Anyone would, I supposed.
I tried to rewrite myself. I scoured boxes of faded flower petals, crumpled ticket stubs, paged obsessively through old yearbooks. Called friend after friend to play do you remember.
When I remembered enough to ask. To know who my friends were.
It didn’t work. Whatever gift he had or curse that I was under that let him pull me into his stories, it was a magic too arcane for me to duplicate.
And still, the gaps in my life increased. New changes happened. I woke one morning to find my hair was white. Not like an old woman’s, but the platinum white of a rock star or some elven queen.
I didn’t dye it back.
There was a collection published of his short fiction. He appeared on Best Of lists, and was shortlisted for important literary prizes.
I forgot if I took milk in my coffee.
He called, asked to see me. Told me he still loved me, was haunted by memories of my skin, my voice, my scent. I missed, I thought, those things, too. So I told him yes.
It took him a moment to recognize me, he said, when I walked across the bar to meet him. Something was different. I told him I didn’t know what that might be.
He ordered for both of us. I let him. I was sure he knew what I liked.
There was a story, he explained. He thought maybe the best thing he would ever write. He could feel the electricity of it crackle across his skin, feel the words that he would write pound and echo in his brain.
He had an outline that I could look at, see what I thought. He slid a slim folder across the table.
I wondered aloud why, this time, he would ask permission. This one was longer. An epic. He wasn’t sure how long it would take him to write it. And after what had happened the last time, when I had…Well. He wanted to ask.
I appreciated the gesture.
I drummed my fingers across the top of the folder, but did not open it.
A waiter discreetly set a martini to the right of my plate. Funny. I had thought that it was Madeleine who drank martinis. But I sipped, and closed my eyes in pleasure at the sharpness of the alcohol.
I said yes.
To one more story, this masterpiece that I could see burning in his eyes. But I had a condition.
Anything, he said. Whatever I needed.
I wanted him to leave me in the story when he was finished.
He told me he had wondered if I might ask for that. I was surprised he hadn’t known. He nodded agreement, and that was settled.
We talked idly through dinner. Occasionally his eyes would unfocus, and I could see the lines of plot being woven together behind them.
I wondered what he would name me this time, almost asked, then realized it didn’t matter. Then realized I wasn’t even sure what my own name was anymore. Grace, maybe? I thought that sounded right. Grace.
He started scribbling on the cover of the folder while we were waiting for the check. I watched him write.
“Rafe fell in love with her voice first, tumbled into it when she introduced herself as…”
LET THE PAST BEGIN
Jonathan Carroll
EAMON REILLY WAS HANDSOME AND SLOPPY. He seemed to know everyone, even waitresses in restaurants. When he walked in the door, they beamed and began seriously flirting the minute he sat down at their table. I saw this happen several times at different places, places none of us had ever been to before. I asked if he knew these women but he always said no.
Eamon wore his heart on his sleeve and it worked. People cared about him even when he was being impossible, which was pretty often. He drove an old, badly neglected Mercedes that was filthy inside and out. Whenever you rode in it, he had to move stuff off the passenger’s seat and throw it in the back. Sometimes you couldn’t believe what was there—a metal dowsing rod; a box of diapers (he was single); a jai alai xistela; or once a very intimately autographed, badly wrinkled photo of a famous movie actress. He wrote everything in block letters so precise that you might have guessed it came from a typewriter. He kept a detailed daily diary but no one ever saw what was in it, although he carried the book around with him everywhere. His love life was a constant disaster and we wondered why no woman ever stayed with him for very long.
He had once been together with my girlfriend Ava for a couple of weeks. But she was no help when I finally got up the nerve to ask why she broke up with him. “We didn’t fit.”
“And?”
“And nothing. Some people just don’t fit together in certain configurations. There are people you can be good friends with, but if you turn it into lovers, the mix is wrong or toxic or…something. For me, Eamon is a good guy to hang around with but he wasn’t a good boyfriend.”
“Why?”
She narrowed her eyes, which is usually the sign a topic is closed and Ava doesn’t want to talk about it anymore. But this time was different. “Sit down.”
“What?”
“Sit down. I’m going to tell you a story. It’s kind of long.”
I did as I was told. When Ava tells you to do something, you do it because, well, because she’s Ava. The woman likes dessert, foreign politics, the truth, working in perilous situations, and wonder, not necessarily in that order. She’s a journalist who goes on assignment to extremely dangerous places around the world like Spinkai Raghzai, Pakistan, or Sierra Leone. You see her on the TV news holding down her hair or helmet as a military helicopter takes off nearby, leaving her and a small camera crew in some forward armed outpost or barren village that was attacked by rebels the night before. She is fearless, self-confident, and impatient. She is also pregnant, which is why she’s home these days. We’re pretty sure the child is mine but there is a chance that it might be Eamon’s.
I’ve known Ava Malcolm twelve years and loved her for about eleven of them. During those eleven years, she expressed virtually no interest in me save for an occasional late-night telephone call from unimaginable places like Ouagadougou or Aleppo. The reception on these calls was invariably bad and scratchy. More often than not until the birth of satellite telephones, somewhere in the middle of these chats the line would suddenly go dead, as if it had grown tired of our gabbing and wanted to go to sleep.
Later she admitted that for a while she thought I was gay. But when she came back from some assignment at the end of the world and saw I was living with Jan Schick, it put an end to my gay days in Ava Malcolm’s mind.
But poor Jan didn’t stand a chance. I always assumed I would only get to love Ava from a distance, be grateful for any time she gave me, and go on admiring this brave talented woman as she went about living her larger-than-life life.
Then she got shot. The bitter irony is that it did not happen in some far-flung flyblown, 130-degree-in-the-shade hellhole where the bad guys rode in on animals instead of tanks. It happened at a convenience store four blocks from her New York apartment. A quick trip to the market for a bottle of red wine and a bag of Cheez Doodles coincided with a dunce named Leaky trying to rob his first store with a gun he later said went off accidentally, twice. One of those bullets nicked Ava’s shoulder. But since it came from a Glock G36 subcompact pistol, being “nicked” was an understatement. It probably would not have happened if she’d dropped to the floor like the rest of the people in the store as soon as Leaky started screaming. But Ava being Ava, she wanted to see what was going on, so she just stood there unti
l the gun went off while pointed roughly in her direction.
Ava saw many terrible things in her years as a reporter but had always escaped being hurt. However, as is often the case with people who have been seriously injured, it traumatized her. When she got out of the hospital, she “traveled, screwed men, and hid for a year.” Her words.
“I came out of the hospital with my arm in a sling and my ass on fire. I was about 142 percent crazy, I’ll say that. I wanted to live life twice as hard afterward—see twice as many things, and have as many men as I could. I’d come this close to dying and the only sure thing I learned from the experience was I wanted more: more life, more sex, more new places…
“So I used up all the frequent-flyer miles I’d accrued over the years in my job. When they were gone, I called in every favor I had due from people who could get me where I wanted to go. I spent a lot of time in southwestern Russia because that area was like the new Wild West, what with all the oil money and exploration going on down there.
“It was in Baku that I met the Yit.”
This was typical Ava storytelling. On her TV reports she gave you relevant information in perfect sound bites and was crystal clear about it. Yet in person she often got so carried away telling you a story or personal anecdote that she overlooked the fact you might not know Baku or, like most people on planet earth, what a “Yit” was.
“Please explain the last two terms.”
“Azerbaijan,” she said impatiently. “Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan.”
“Okay, that’s Baku. What’s a Yit?”
“A djelloum.”
“What’s a jell-loom?”
“A Yit is another word for a djelloum—kind of like a fortune-teller but more shamany. It’s a sort of combo fortune-teller and sage. But in Azerbaijan, women are djelloum, not men. Which is interesting because it’s a very macho, male-oriented society otherwise.”