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…
