Eve
By Matthew Brandon
Mostly, she sits and waits for him to come home.
Her body is misty. Sometimes, she grabs at her own elbows just to make sure she is there, that she isn’t fading, that hands don’t go right through skin. She feels like fog on water, and she is trying not to dip below the surface. There is drowning down there, in her body. The no-thing nothing of her not-there body. Cold, quiet drowning. Her consciousness drifts in waves like a sudden rolling signal over miles of static, some spotlight of still-life glinting over the dreaming desert of her, like all she is is a dwindling ball of light trying to illuminate a skeleton without bones.
He comes home at night. He doesn’t always see her.
She lives like she is pretending to live. She paces the halls. She lays in bed. She waits and waits and waits for him to open the front door. Everything she does feels like memory. Remember when you had arms? Lifting them, wrapping them around someone? And legs? Strong enough to hold you up, hours at a time? What about those toes? Sinking into the carpet, leaving a tiny pattern? Those hands, too? Cupping them to see if you can catch anything in the cradle of your fingers?
No, she can barely do anything now. She sleeps all the time, though that isn’t the word for it. It’s more like she loses time, more like she is a head bobbing above the surface for quick, tight-chested breaths before drowning again.
All she does is wait. What else is there to do? There is her bookshelf, what he used to call her haunt, but the books are filled with nonsense words. They don’t mean anything anymore. The world is blurry at the edges. Her own vision dims like slow blinks before bed. She has no peripherals, and everything moves like reflections underwater. Everything gives the appearance of apparition, of hollow set pieces, but she knows she is the hollow one.
She is dead, of course.
Of course.
She knows this. She knows because he reminds her. When she forgets.
There is the pain, too. The tightness in her throat and the blooming heat in her ribs. She breathes like someone who has forgotten how. When she tries, she is the howling wind in every midnight forest, the creaking door of every haunted house. She cannot stop trying to gasp for breath, trying to work around the tightening cave-in of her esophagus and the hitching slats in her side that feel like they were nailed in backwards.
You have unfinished business, Adam told her once.
Her hands cup open and closed – remember – trying to remember how to grasp his hand with numb fingers.
Love, he said. You don’t want to leave me. Even now.
She cannot see herself in the mirror. This does not make her anything mythical. That’s not the word for what she is. Lonely, maybe. Clingy. Dramatic. Those are words he called her once, before. When they were fighting. Like a prophecy, these words have come true.
When Adam glides through that front door, she hovers around him, relieved to not be alone, yearning to touch him but not wanting to scare him. He does an odd thing no one does in houses and shuffles on his coat once inside, molting in reverse. His breath smokes out between his teeth as he adjusts to the new climate. She has made this place uninhabitable with her staying, her clinging, her drama. Still, he comes. His eyes are searching for her. They skip right over her and go on looking.
Oh, to be seen. It was a luxury. She remembers that, at least.
Her existence hangs on his seeing her, like a noose, tightening, tightening. She tries to touch him, but she is dizzy, seeing double. Her hand slips right through the false him, falls on nothing. This is the way it is, she realizes. The dead are always trying to reach us.
Forcing the words up like bile, she finds her voice: Tell me the story again.
He cannot hear her tonight. She is thin, a veil between veils.
She remembers a different time. Body, house, all of it. The remembering feels like squinting her mind. See it there, far away, what was it like? She remembers rows of desks with children raising their sticky hands to give wrong answers to easy questions. She remembers the smell of dry-erase markers on her fingers and the quick, zappy peal of the bell. She remembers the classic apple on her desk, and she remembers giving it back, apologetically.
A teacher allergic to apples, Adam had said. Aren’t you a story.
It’s all a dream. That life, a fiction. This is her reality now.
He tells her this, too.
He’s the one who puts names to things.
Sometimes, you appear. Other times, you’re just…not. For long stretches. And then, suddenly, you are. Just, you know, standing there. Just like normal. Complaining about your throat. A chicken bone. Don’t you remember the chicken bone? There was still a bit of bone, maybe the wishbone, in a chicken breast you bought. It got lodged the wrong way in your throat. You were home alone. You tried to self-Heimlich. You broke this chair and a few ribs. This chair right here. A wishbone. Can you believe it?
She runs her hand across the chair. Lopsided but fixed. Sutured together at the seams with wood glue and resurrected. Some things get a second life.
Why don’t I remember?
Why would you want to?
He is there, sometimes, when the choking happens. The pain feels more real than anything in her body. The terrified thumping of her phantom heart feels like an echo. She thinks, how can I be afraid of death if I’ve already died?
He does not hold her, but he surrounds her with his arms, kneeling on the floor before her.
It’s not real, he says. It’s just a memory.
Something is stuck in my throat.
You don’t have a throat. It’s not real. None of this is real.
He’s sleeping, there, in the bed. She feels like the thing he is dreaming, like she only remains here because he needs it. He is both her clock and her tether, how she tells time and how she comes back from wherever she goes when she loses time. When she crawls into bed beside him, she places her hands on his bare back, her cheek on his neck.
He starts to shiver in his sleep.
It will feel like this for some time. It will feel like being alive. You have to remember it’s not. Don’t be fooled. You are very much dead, and you can’t do the things the living can do. Those things are lost to you, even though you remember them.
(remember)
In the morning, with the sheets pulled back and only a cold impression of his body read like tea leaves in the wrinkles of the bed, he is gone. Like he is the dead one.
Through the windows, where the neighborhood should be, a fantastically bright light the color of nothing shines at all hours. Out there is oblivion, she knows that. He tells her this. If she could pass through these walls, if the doorknob twisted for her, she would move on to whatever is after. Maybe it’s better than this. Maybe it’s kind and peaceful. Maybe she won’t be in pain.
Adam says it’s awful. Says it will annihilate her, and that will annihilate him.
I’ll follow you, he says to empty rooms when he cannot see her. If you go away forever, I’ll go too. I’ll cut a simple strip of rope, and I’ll stand on that chair that broke you, and it will break again when I kick it away from me and come after you.
So she stays.
He brought her flowers once. Tried to pretend they were a normal, happy, everyday married couple. Honey, I’m home.
She watched the petals freeze and snap off like ice chips.
She does have nightmares. Sometimes, when she is not here. Of snakes sinking their long fangs into her skin. Something like vampires, after the meat of her neck – twisting, biting, drinking the juice, chewing on the pulp.
Do the dead dream? Can they be haunted?
She remembers something different. She remembers driving.
(REMEMBER)
Those things don’t matter anymore. All those life worries, all those little fights we used to have. The only thing that remains is us now. You staying here. Me coming back. Even in death, you and I stay together. Right here. In this house. Forever, now.
She does what she is supposed to do. She flits around the house causing a little mess. She has returned to his desk to read the silent history of what happened. The legal case Adam had been working up against the grocery store selling the chicken breast, her death certificate, a pamphlet of her funeral with a face she doesn’t recognize in a porthole window on the cover – she sends the papers flying, throws pens and paper clips across the room. It makes her dizzy but, God, if it doesn’t make her feel alive.
When she is finished, she stands in a graveyard of letterheads. Among all that white, there are flashes of red, a sudden expressionistic painting. She is drip-dropping on the papers, sprinkling blood like holy water over the entire history of her death. It’s coming down her thighs. Little trickles of red forming a secret river. Her finger traces up into her nightgown, along the trail and to the source.
Then: she pulls her finger out and watches the blood fill the grooves of her fingerprint, swirling like letters, telling her a story she knows she has heard before.
Yes, this one she remembers.
When Adam returns that night, she does not appear to him. He calls out to her, but she does not respond. She stands against the wall on the far side, her bloody finger behind her back, starting to cross her fingers but not remembering quite how.
When she is alone again, when she emerges from her sleepwalking haze, she drifts to the kitchen. The silverware drawer clangs at her opening, but it’s been neutered. She moves to where the knife block should be on the counter, but it’s absent. Clang, clang, goes every drawer, shuffling their insides, but what she’s looking for is nowhere to be found. Nothing sharp. Not here. Not in this house.
So many little, tiny errors. A world almost like the real one. She sees it now, because she is looking for it. The stovetop that clicks but does not light. The shower knob that twists to no water. The hanging string to the attic ladder that tugs the entire ceiling with it and does not move. When Adam comes home, the shadow of his body fills the doorframe, backed by that white oblivion light he cannot see. His breath plumes. For him, it’s only the neighborhood out there, yet when he turns back to close the door behind him, the light glints off his glasses.
There you are, baby.
He is eating dinner alone at the table, rice out of a takeout box. He has set her a place, but she’s not sitting there. She’s standing beside him, observing him. How he eats, how he doesn’t see her. Sometimes he talks aloud to her, in hopes she’s there. Pretends he’s having a dinner date.
She knows she can affect him: a cold touch, a cold breath, take things out of his hands. If she breathes on him, he will know she’s there.
Leaning in close to the side of his face, she makes a sudden jerk towards him. His eyes flinch with the tiniest blink.
She is standing in the bathroom, staring at the blank mirror. Like dead things in every folktale, there is no reflection. She runs a hand across it. Taps on the glass. It makes a mirror sound. She draws her face close and breathes.
Haaaa.
It does not fog. She traces a finger along. Finds a bubble in its skin. Runs it back to the edge and begins to pick.
Scratch. Fiddle.
Until she peels enough of the mirror to catch her nail under, and then she pulls. It strips off in ribbons, this sticker of the bathroom in reverse. It feels like tearing off her own skin.
Underneath, there is only a flat wall.
She finds her reflection in a spoon. Upside-down and sickly white. She shuffles off her gown and runs the spoon across all angles. She is all bones: her pelvis nearly poking out of her skin; her side, rosy with rainbow bruises; her skin translucent but intact, not at all see-through.
There are spots on her neck she cannot see with her own eyes. Little snake bites that are pocked red, and some of them are fresh and bruising, just under the ear. She thinks of her nightmares. She tries to remember.
She makes a mess. This is what she must do. Increase her activity. Make herself known. Make the house unlivable for those who remain.
But none of this is the point; the mess is a cover-up of the real crime: she takes the potted snake plant, the one with leaves sharp like knives, and she throws it onto the kitchen tile. From the debris, she picks out a clay shard, sharpens it against other shards. Then she sharpens it against her finger.
He’s loosening his tie. Looking around. The house is littered with dirt, torn papers, broken dishes, even the fateful chair that broke her ribs is in tatters too.
Baby? Are you here?
She’s standing against the wall. Watching him look for her.
He can see her footprints, how she tracked herself through the potted soil and stepped across the carpet. He follows the trail up to the wall, to where she’s standing. He looks right through her. He passes into the bedroom, where the soiled footprints lead, and she follows behind. There, above the bed in bright red brushstrokes are the words written in her fingerpaint blood.
ITS NOT REAL
Cutting herself freshens her mind. Her shredded finger is now the burning cigarette tip of consciousness. She cuts herself to remain, the opposite of a child pinching their elbow to wake up from a dream. The blood warms her, and the pain elucidates her, summons her, saying her name and calling her into existence. When Adam comes home, she hides the potsherd underneath his pillow, dons her gown and hides her nakedness, the gashes she is beginning in her thighs that keep her eyes open.
She knows she has done some irrevocable wrong. She knows that the knowledge is killing her. She also knows she has no choice but to keep bleeding for this knowledge. New and alive with pain, birthing herself back into existence, reimagining herself piece by piece, she remembers.
She remembers.
He is on top of her, straddling her. His hands are CPRing her but in the wrong place. On the fracture point of her ribs, and he’s knocking. She cracks open like a pack of glowsticks. Letting all the light out of her.
He sweats.
Then his fingers are in her mouth, and he’s prying her jaw open. A dropper in the other hand. It drips a sappy color down her throat. Her esophagus closes up as if to accept this offering.
The sickly-sweet coppery stink of apples fills her nostrils.
When he is finished, when she is moaning like the dead, he pricks her neck, just under the ear, with a syringe that makes everything go black.
Oh, yes, she dreams of snakes.
She grabs a chair – the chair – fixed once again, and hurls it at the window. It is the chair that shatters, that abused thing, while the window bends in an odd way. She pushes against it: plexiglass. So many tiny little errors.
She practices. That is what she does. That is the only thing she can do.
She lays in bed and practices swinging. Practices grabbing and swinging. Practices until it feels like instinct, a sneeze. Like she can’t help it.
When she starts, it feels like moving through sludge, so she practices with heavier objects, working all the way up to the cast iron skillet, until she moves on her own through the air like a viper and the muscles in her snake around her forearm.
She practices until she can’t remember ever not practicing.
Swinging, swinging, swinging.
I was going to leave you, she says.
She is bending down and speaking into the cone of his ear. Haunting him.
I remember driving. I remember having a fight. I don’t remember what it was about, but I remember it being enough. I remember driving away from you, but I don’t remember arriving. You hit my car. I remember. You broke my ribs, and then you dragged me back and invented a story. I know what you did. I figured it out. I remembered. I know what evil is, and it’s you.
He doesn’t respond. He cannot hear her tonight.
It’s impossible to tell time with the constant shining of the light outside the house, but still she practices. Still, she waits and wills herself to wake up. All she needs to do is wake up once. Just once.
Open her eyes and wake up.
Come alive.
The air is getting worse. She knows that during the day, something gets pumped through the vents and at night, through her veins. She soaks her nightgown in toilet water and presses the hem against her face. Sucking on the moisture, she drowns to keep herself clear.
Then she returns to her cutting.
Blood and water.
She is having the nightmare of the vampire, of the snake. Thinking she is still practicing, she moves in her dream how she does while awake. Her hand glides, grabs, stabs.
Her eyes are opening, the dream fading. Before her, the strained face of Adam washed out by the window light. The syringe is deep in his side, and blood is budding on his shirt where she has stuck him. She has not practiced this next part. She remembers what she must do in pieces, but he is slow with shock, so she can take her time pushing down on the syringe stopper, letting all the poison drift into him. The light flickers from his eyes, flashing behind the reflected light in those glasses.
Baby, he says.
They switch places, her gently catching him and letting him fall onto the bed, the syringe still sticking out between his ribs, bobbing with the motion. Now she is on top of him, and for a moment, she thinks of all the things she could do. Really haunt him this time, really, really. She runs her hands over his body. They can touch. Of course they can. He stares up at her in unblinking horror. His body is numbing, his thoughts are muddying. It will feel as if he is dead.
She knows this. He doesn’t have to tell her.
She slaps him. He recoils.
Can you see me now? Can you?
She pulls herself off, stumbling, not exactly clear, not yet, and she finds his backpack. Inside: a bag of baby wipes, tampons, a box with a syringe, a dropper, and three rows of vials. One row is the sedative, some kind of heavy anesthetic to keep her sleepwalking; another must be nutrients, an intravenous drip, to keep her barely alive; and the last batch – she opens one and smells it. She can name it herself without him.
Apple juice. Drops of it. Not enough to trigger an allergic reaction, but enough to close up her throat.
Where is the key?
Don’t leave. You can’t leave.
Where is it?
You don’t have to go. You could stay.
You had to know this couldn’t last forever. You made so many mistakes.
He finds something funny in that. I wanted you to have a choice.
I was going to leave you. I always was.
It doesn’t have to stop. Just because you know.
She mounts him, like he did to her every night. She wraps her fingers around his neck. She could squeeze until his eyes pop. She could see what the dead really look like.
Why? Why?
The way he is smiling: blissful. Drool dribbles down his chin.
He says, I was lonely without you.
Her squeezing pinkies catch something cold and metal. She finds a chain, lifts it up. The key dangles off a necklace. She breaks the chain with a quick snap.
Is your name even Adam?
He purses his lips, as if for a kiss. Shhh, he says. He tries to laugh. It sounds like he’s underwater. I love you, you know. I feed you and clean you and change you every night. That’s love. You’ll die out there. No one will care for you like I have. His eyes are rolling back in his head, fighting with the childish urge to stay up past his bedtime. You’ll live forever. If you stay. Here. If you leave. You’ll die.
I want to.
She lets the key lead her to the front door. It clicks in perfectly, and the supernatural doorknob that was only ever locked twists, and the door that was welded shut to her opens easily.
She steps out into the blinding light of oblivion.
Behind her, there is no house. Only the wooden backside of a facade with beams diagonally holding itself up. It looks like a human body turned inside out, retaining the same shape but exposing the muscles, flesh flipped inward.
She is on the other side of the floodlights, aimed and humming directly at the windows. Their shafts of light look like a pair of flaming swords crisscrossed in an otherwise dark and vacant warehouse. The house is a three-dimensional facade, a set piece, and at every turn, she is backstage. It sits there in its spotlight.
There’s an air conditioner rattling, a silver cord coiled at its feet, strapped into the facade’s air ducts. The temperature on the machine reads 56 degrees. Beside it sits a clothing rack on wheels. Hanging there are a dozen replicas of her nightgown, fresh and clean and pressed and waiting for her.
She heaves the heavy sliding metal door of the warehouse open and stumbles out into warm summer air. Stars overhead. The moon, bright and ivory like another floodlight, is almost full. Her numb skin already begins to thaw. Half-running, half-limping, she slaps down the row of warehouses in her bare feet, crying silently, blood streaming down her thighs.
Nearby, someone locks the door of a similar warehouse, jiggling the padlock out of habit. When he turns and sees her running towards him, his face goes white, like he’s seen a ghost.
~~~
