The Curiosities (Carolrhoda Ya) (22 page)

M
y mother cut my heart out and put it in a box.

If this was a story, that’s how it would end.

It would begin with snow and the tragic, impersonal death of a young trophy wife and fade into a montage of the replacement bride, how she drenched her hair with honey and washed her face with milk.

That part’s true.

When my father remarried, the woman was unapologetically vain. She spent hours in front of the mirror, looking all alabaster and perfect. On Wednesdays and Saturdays she went downtown to the day spa, where they shaped her fingernails and peeled the top layer of her skin off with various kinds of acid.

I stayed home and dyed my hair. I caked my face with powder and drew black lines around my eyes to show everyone the difference between us, that I wasn’t like her, that she wasn’t really my mother. She kept buying me dresses in pink and turquoise and acting like we could be best friends.

Let me start again. My father’s wife had my heart cut out. She put it in a box.

The secret is that it wasn’t really my heart. Her slim gigolo boyfriend took me out to the Presidio, where the salt wind blew in off the sea. He touched my face and breathed licorice and aftershave on me, which made me want to scream. Then he bought a pound of lamb’s heart from a butcher in Greek Town and took it home to her. He told her he loved her. He told her that the dense, membranous muscle belonged to me.

Okay, that last part was a lie. Can you tell that I’m lying? My stepmother doesn’t have a boyfriend. But if she did, he’d be young, with wavy hair and bad shoes. He’d be the kind of guy who knows where to buy organ meat in primarily ethnic neighborhoods.

This is more like it: my obscenely vain stepmother put on her fifty-dollar Dior eye shadow and her Manolo Blahnik pumps and reached for her Gaultier clutch. She cut her own heart out and dipped it in lead or mercury—one of those metals that poisons you and makes you go crazy. She fed it to me in sly, careful moments, in pieces, so that I would be like her.

I sat in my room with the shades pulled down, and the venom of her heart moved like poison, getting under my skin and making me all drowsy. She spent hours by the country-club pool, trying to look younger, but washed-up socialites never do.

I lay with the blankets over me, so heavy I couldn’t move my head. My dye job was starting to grow out and the roots were showing. I stayed so long it felt like I was turning into stone.

Then one night she came to my room like a silentfilm star, slightly crazed, smelling like gin, and yanked me out of bed. She sat me in front of the ruffled vanity, studying me with bleary eyes.

“I just want you to like me,” she said. “I just want us to do things together. Why don’t you like me?”

The whole time she kept touching me in that clumsy, drunk way, tugging at my hair. I watched her reflection so I wouldn’t have to watch my own—the crumpled way her mouth seemed to just collapse. Her eyelids were dark and greasy-looking, like she’d bruised them.

She took me by the shoulders and shook me hard, suddenly. “Why are you doing this to yourself? Why do you insist on looking like a freak? Are you determined to embarrass me?”

She brandished a handkerchief—white, petal-soft—and began to scrub my face. She scrubbed hard and fierce until my mouth got pink and so did my cheeks. She wiped my makeup off like she was scrubbing me back to life.

“Answer me,” she kept saying, but her voice sounded weird and shrill, and the words had stopped making sense.

When I opened my mouth, it felt like a tiny version of a black hole, where light disappeared and nothing could come out. She shook me, and my head rocked back and forth. I couldn’t stop nodding.

She swept from the room without warning and came back with the scissors. I closed my eyes. The blades made a whispering noise,
snick, snick
. I felt lighter.

When she dropped the shears on the carpet, I didn’t know how to feel. It was the worst thing anyone had ever done to me. I had a sudden thought that no one had ever really done anything to me. It was glorious and shocking. I didn’t feel like myself, but for the first time in years, I didn’t feel like I was trying to be someone else.

In the mirror, my hair was brutally short. It stuck up everywhere, patchy-black in places, but most of it was blond—my real color. My mouth and cheeks were hectic, and my eyes looked wild. My blood felt like electricity. Like I could do anything.

We sat in front of the mirror, staring at my reflection. She was crying now, sloppy and horrifying, asking me to forgive her.

I wanted to tell her not to cry. That I forgave her for her smallness, for so many reasons.

I was something breathtaking and rare now, while she would never be beautiful again.

This is another one of those stories that made me uncomfortable to post, because it was so strange. It was based on a dream, as many of my short stories are, but it spiraled wildly out of control from there. I played with two of my favorite themes:
neurotic geniuses and fallible
leaders. —Maggie

M
y name is Scott Anthony Caul, and I am E. M. Parmander’s only living assistant.

Parmander is a genius and a philosopher and as such is very difficult to work with. He also has a disregard for his own personal safety that would have been thrilling to watch if it hadn’t extended to my safety as well.

“I’m not certain this is the best of ideas,” I tell him. I bore even myself halfway through the sentence, so many times have I said it. Parmander is in the process of building a flying machine. It is all gears and canvas and rope, and somehow it is powered by thirteen frantic sparrows that are caged in a bamboo nest in its belly. The cage has no door.

“I will need you to fly it, Caul,” Parmander says in response.
“My thighs are too monstrous to fit in the seat. No starches tonight.”

Parmander has no thighs of which to speak. Aside from being a genius and a philosopher, he is also vain, and his intelligent, thoughtful variety of vanity means that he will often skip meals while he works. He studies himself in reflective surfaces. Pinches the skin at his hipbone and makes a wrinkle to match the one that appears between his eyebrows. Pensively brings back up the contents of his stomach after lengthy luncheons. If his thighs are too monstrous to fit the seat of the machine, then he has built the seat too small or he intended all along for me to fly it.

I crouch to look at the sparrows. They are horrified by my presence and flap crazily about. Their activity makes something in the machine hum, and its canvas wings twitch as if to flap.

“Caul,” Parmander says, “You are agitating the engine. Come away.”

I come away.

“Where,” I ask, “is it you’re wanting me to fly this thing?”

“Pshaw,”
says Parmander, “You needn’t sound so ill-tempered.”

“Have a tangerine,” I suggest, because tangerines will frequently improve his mood. He refuses the fruit. I have it. I say, “I don’t think there’s any use to having this flying machine. Where is it you want to go with it, other than up into the fog?”

Parmander gazes wistfully out of the garage. The scene before us is a maze of roads, crawling with vehicles driven by gears and powered by bellows thrusting steam and darkened by coal. There is nothing quite as elegant as Parmander’s flying machine,
all bleached cotton canvas and whips of golden bamboo.
Over all of it is the fog, and below it the black birds and the pigeons that cannot be troubled to challenge the clouds.

“Through the fog,” Parmander says. “Over the fog. To where the fog ends and the sky begins.”

I have another tangerine as he begins to expound upon how only in the unpolluted air can man truly be free to contemplate the complexities of existence. I should be tidying—geniuses leave a lot of clutter behind—but it seems to me that if I am going to risk my neck going up in the machine, I shouldn’t have to work.

“If I could fit my hideous buttocks into the machine, I would fly to the Tower,” Parmander muses.

He is just trying to bait me now. The Tower is a massive, prewar stone structure that lies in the middle of a moat. The fixed bridge that takes you over the moat is submerged under a foot of water so that there is no way to get to the Tower itself without getting wet. This is because the Tower contains a breed of cloaked monsters who cannot cross water. They are forbidden to come in contact with humans—not that this is likely to happen, as precious few cross the flooded bridge to the island.

“And convert the monsters to Parmanderty,” I say. This is what Parmander has named his brand of philosophy. It revolves around purification and denial and clarity of thought and women not wanting to have sex with you. There are finer points, but that is the bulk of it.

Parmander adjusts the rudder of the machine. “Breaths,” he says. “Not monsters. St. Vladimir’s Breaths, that’s what we knew them as, because they were so quiet. Get in the machine so I can strap you in.”

I get in. The seat is small and uncomfortable and pinches parts I’d rather not pinch. It wouldn’t have pinched Parmander any worse than me, however. He straps my foot down in a place that will be difficult for me to reach myself if I crash.

“Knew them as when?”

“When I was a student at the Tower,” Parmander says. The birds are beginning to flap around again, and the whole machine is humming. I feel it in the foot Parmander has strapped down. It feels like it is buzzing up my leg. He straps down my other foot.

“I didn’t know you were a student at the Tower.”

Parmander lays a strap across my waist and pulls it tight. Now I can feel the entire machine thrumming, the wings thinking of flapping even if they are not already. “I was there for twelve years, Caul,” he says. “That is when we built them.”

The machine is shaking the heartbeat out of me. “You...built...the monsters?”

“That is why they cannot cross the water,” Parmander concurs. Disconcertingly, he binds my hands to the steering device. “The current that runs through their gears and brains would short out if they put their feet in it.”

I can feel the power of the machine working all through my body, from my feet on the copper foot plates to the hard seat to my fingers bound to the metal of the steering wheel. The wings are starting to buffet air beneath them. I can barely hear the birds flying around in their bamboo cage.

“But you will not have to worry about that,” Parmander says. “Because you are flying over it.”

The machine is flying, flapping, pulsing, throbbing in time with the beat of my heart and I realize, suddenly, that I am the machine and the machine is me. I am not so much lashed on as plugged in.

“When?” I gasp as the flying machine lurches forward and the birds howl. I feel gears grind inside me, tendons tied onto wire, wire embedded in lungs, lungs fed by bellows, bellows turned by screws. “When did you build me?”

“When I needed you,” Parmander replies. He shakes his head as he looks at my unchangeable form. Now I can see the wistful envy, the same that he directed at the sky earlier.

Parmander is giving me directions to the Tower, telling me all of mankind wants nothing more than to return to its point of origin, and that is where we shall find perfection, only it is a we I am no longer a part of. I cannot listen to him. As the birds and my fearful body power the flying machine, I am building a new philosophy.