North American Lake Monsters (24 page)

There’s nothing wrong with you,
he’d said.

She opened the door.

The light was like ground glass in her eyes. It was the most astonishing pain she had ever experienced. She screamed, dropped to the floor, and curled into herself. Very distantly she heard something heavy fall over, followed by crashing footsteps which thrummed the floor beneath her head, and then the door slammed shut. Her husband’s hands fell on her and she twisted away from them. The light was a paste on her eyes; she couldn’t seem to claw it off of them. It bled into her skull and filled it like a poisonous radiation. She lurched to her feet, shouldering Sean aside, and ran away from the door and into the living room, where she tripped over the carpet and landed hard on her side. Her husband’s hysterical voice followed her, a blast of panic. She pushed her body forward with her feet, wedged her face into the space beneath the couch, the cool darkness there, and tried to claw away the astounding misery of the light.

That night she would not come to bed. They’d been sleeping beside each other since the suicide,
though he was careful to keep space between them, and had taken to wearing pajamas to bed. She slept fitfully at night, seeming to rest better in the daylight, and this troubled his own sleep, too. She would be as still as stone and then struggle elaborately with the sheets for a few moments before settling into stillness again, like a drowning woman. He turned his head toward the wall when this happened. And then he would remember that he’d turned away from her that night, too. And he would stay awake into the small hours, feeling her struggle, knowing that he’d missed his chance to help her.

The incident at the door had galvanized him, though. Her pain was terrifying in its intensity, and it was his fault. He would not let his guilt or his shame prevent him from doing whatever was necessary to keep her safe and comfortable from now on. Love still lived in him, like some hibernating serpent, and it stirred now. It tasted the air with its tongue.

It took her some time to calm down. He fixed her a martini and brought it to her, watched her sip it disinterestedly as she sat on the couch and stared at the floor, her voice breaking every once in a while in small hiccups of distress. Long nail marks scored her skin; her right eye seemed jostled in its orbit, angled fractionally lower than the other. He had drawn the curtains and pulled the blinds, though by now the sun had sunk and the world outside was blue and cool. He turned off all but a few lights in the house, filling it with shadows. Whether it was this, or the vodka, or something else that did it, she finally settled into a fraught silence.

He eased himself onto the couch beside her, and he took her chin in his fingers and turned her face toward him. An echo of his thought from the night of the suicide passed through his mind:
She will never get better.

He felt his throat constrict, and heat gathered in his eyes.

“Katie?” He put his hand on her knee. “Talk to me, babe.”

She was motionless. He didn’t even know if she could hear him.

“Are you all right? Are you in any pain?”

After a long moment, she said, “It was in my head.”

“What was?”

“The light. I couldn’t get it out.”

He nodded, trying to figure out what this meant. “Well. It’s dark now.”

“Thank you,” she said.

This small gratitude caused an absurd swelling in his heart, and he cupped her cheek in his hand. “Oh baby,” he said. “I was so scared. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to do for you.”

She put her own hand over his, and pressed her cheek into his palm. Her eyes remained unfocused though, one askew, almost as if this was a learned reaction. A muscle memory. Nothing more.

“I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said. “Everything is strange.”

“I know.”

She seemed to consider something for a moment. “I should go somewhere else,” she said.

“No,” Sean said. A violence moved inside him, the idea of her leaving calling forth an animal fury, aimless and electric. “No, Katie. You don’t understand. They’ll take you away from me. If I take you somewhere, if I take you to see someone, they will not let you come back. You just stay here. You’re safe here. We’ll keep things dark, like you like it. We’ll do whatever it takes. Okay?”

She looked at him. The lamplight from the other room reflected from her irises, giving them a creamy whiteness that looked warm and soft, incongruous in her torn face, like saucers of milk left out after the end of the world. “Why?”

The question shamed him. “Because I love you, Katie. Jesus Christ. You’re my wife. I love you.”

“I love you, too,” she said, and like pressing her cheek into his hand, this response seemed an automatic action. A programmed response. He ignored this, though, and chose to accept what she said as truth—perhaps because this was the first time she’d said it to him since the suicide, when her body had stopped behaving in the way it was meant to and conformed to a new logic, a biology he did not recognize and could not understand and which made a mystery of her again. It had been so long since she’d been a mystery to him. He knew every detail of her life, every dull complaint and every stillborn dream, and she knew his; but now he knew nothing. Every nerve ending in his body was turned in her direction, like flowers bending to the sun.

Or perhaps he only accepted it because the light was soft, and it exalted her.

His free hand found her breast. She did not react in any way. He squeezed it gently in his hand, his thumb rolling over her nipple, still soft under her shirt. She allowed all of this, but her face was empty. He pulled away from her. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

He rose and, taking her hand, moved to help her to her feet. She resisted.

“Katie, come on. Let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But don’t you . . .” He took her hand and pressed it against his cock, stiff in his pants. “Can you feel that? Can you feel what you do to me?”

“I don’t want to go upstairs. The light will come in in the morning. I want to sleep in the cellar.”

He released her hand, and it dropped to her side. He thought for a minute. The cellar was used for storage, and was in a chaotic state. But there was room for a mattress down there, and tomorrow he could move things around, make some arrangements, and make it livable. It did not occur to him to argue with her. This was part of the mystery, and it excited him. He was like a high school boy with a mad new crush, prepared to go to any length.

“Okay,” he said. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll make it nice for you.”

He left her sitting in the dark, his heart pounding, red and strong.

He fucked her with the ardor one brings to a new lover, sliding into the surprising coolness of her,
tangling his fingers into her hair and biting her neck, her chin, her ears. He wanted to devour her, to breathe her like an atmosphere. He hadn’t been so hard in years; his body moved like a piston, and he felt he could go on for hours. He slid his arms beneath her and held her shoulders from behind as he powered into her, the mattress silent beneath them, the darkness of the cellar as gentle and welcoming as a mother’s heart. At first she wrapped her legs around his back, put her arms over his shoulders, but by the time he finished she had abandoned the pretense and simply lay still beneath him, one eye focused on the underbeams of the ceiling, one eye peering into the black.

Afterwards he lay beside her, staring up at the underside of his house. The cellar was cold and stank
of mildew. The piled clutter of a long and settled life loomed around them in mounted stacks, tall black shadows which gazed down upon them like some alien congress. The mattress beneath them came from their own bed; he’d resolved to sleep down here with her, if this was where she wanted to be. Three candles were gathered in a little group by their heads, not because he thought it would be romantic—though he felt that it was—but because he had no idea where the outlets were down here to set up a lamp, and he didn’t want to risk upsetting her by turning on the bare bulb in the ceiling. The candlelight didn’t seem to bother her at all, though; maybe it was just the sun.

He turned his head on the pillow to look at her, and ran his hand along the length of her body. It was cool to the touch, cool inside and out.

“This other light doesn’t bother you, does it, babe?”

She turned her head too, slowly, and looked at him. Her wounds cast garish shadows across her face in the candlelight. “Hmm?”

“The light?”

“. . . Oh, I know you,” she said, something like relief in her voice. “You’re the man who left me in the water.”

Something cold flowed through his body. “What?”

She settled back against the mattress, closing her eyes and pulling the sheet up to her chin. She seemed very content. “I couldn’t remember you for a minute, but then I did.”

“Do you remember that night?”

“What night?”

“. . . You said I’m the man who left you in the water.”

“I looked up and I saw you. I was scared of something. I thought you were going to help, but then you went away. What was I scared of? Do you know?”

He shook his head, but her eyes were closed and she couldn’t see him. “No,” he said at last.

“I wish I could remember.”

She climbed off the mattress, leaving the man to sleep. He snored loudly, and this made her think of
machines again. His was a clumsy one, loud and rattling, and its inefficiency irritated her. It was corpulent and heavy, uncared for, and breaking down. She decided at that moment that she would not let it touch her again.

She slipped her nightgown on over her head and walked upstairs. Cautiously, she opened the door at the top and peered into the ground floor of the house. It was welcomingly dark. Crossing the living room floor and parting the curtains, she saw that night had fallen.

Within moments she was outside, walking briskly along the sidewalk, crackling with an energy she hadn’t felt in as long as she could remember. The houses on either side of the street were high-shouldered monsters, their windows as black and silent as the sky above her. The yawn of space opened just beneath the surface of her thoughts with a gorgeous silence. She wanted to sink into it, but she couldn’t figure out how. Each darkened building held the promise of tombs, and she had to remind herself that she could not go inside them because people lived there, those churning, squirting biologies, and that the quietude she sought would be found somewhere else.

She remembered a place she could go, though. She quickened her pace, her nightgown—the one she had worn that night, when the man had left her in the water, now clean and white—almost ephemeral in the chilly air and trailing behind her like a ghostly film. The narrow suburban road crested a hill a few hundred feet ahead, and beyond it breached a low dome of light. The city, burning light against the darkness.

Something lay on the sidewalk in front of her, and she slowed as she approached. It was a robin, its middle torn open, its guts eaten away. A curtain of ants flowed inside it and led away from it in a meandering trail into the grass. She picked it up and cradled it close to her face. The ants seethed, spreading through its feathers, over her hand, down her arm. She ignored them.

The bird’s eyes were glassy and black, like tiny onyx stones. Its beak was open, and in it she could see the soft red muscle of its tongue. Something moved and glistened in the back of its throat.

She continued on, holding the robin at her side. She didn’t feel the ants crawling up her arm, onto her neck, into her hair. The bird was a miracle of beauty.

The suburbs stopped at the highway, like an island against the sea. She turned east, the city lights brighter now at her right, and continued walking. The sidewalk roughened as she continued along, broken in places, seasoned with stones and broken glass. She was oblivious to it all. Traffic was light but not incidental, and the rush of cars blowing by lifted her hair and flattened the nightgown against her body. Someone leaned on the horn as he drove past, whooping through an open window.

The clamor of the highway, the stink of oil and gasoline, the buffeting rush of traffic, all served to deepen her sense of displacement. The world was a bewildering, foreign place, the light a low-grade burn and a stain on the air, the rushing cars on the highway a row of gnashing teeth.

But ahead, finally, opening in long, silent acres to her left, was the cemetery.

It was gated and locked, but finding a tree to get over the wall was no difficulty. She scraped her skin on the bark and then on the stone, and she tore her nightgown, but that was of no consequence. She tumbled gracelessly to the ground, like a dropped sack, and felt a sharp snap in her right ankle. When she tried to walk, the ankle rolled beneath her and she fell.

Meat, getting in the way.

Disgusted by this, she used the wall to pull herself to a standing position. She found that if she let the foot just roll to the side and walked on the ankle itself, she could make a clumsy progress.

Clouds obscured the sky, and the cemetery stretched over a rolling landscape, bristling with headstones and plaques, monuments and crypts, like a scattering of teeth. It was old; many generations were buried here. The sound of the highway, muffled by the wall, faded entirely from her awareness. She stood amidst the graves and let their silence fill her.

The flutter of unease that she’d felt since waking after the suicide abated. The sense of disconnection was gone. Her heart was a still lake. Nothing in her moved. She wanted to cry from relief.

Still holding the dead robin in her hand, she lurched more deeply into the cemetery.

She found a hollow between the stones, a trough between the stilled waves of earth, where no burial was marked. She eased herself to the ground and curled up in the grass. The clouds were heavy and thick, the air was cold. She closed her eyes and felt the cooling of her brain.

Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.

It was new knowledge, and she felt the root of a purpose. She set the robin aside and tore grass away, dug her nails into the dark soil, pushed through. She scooped aside handfuls of dirt. At some point in her labors she became aware of something awaiting her beneath the earth. Moving silences, the cloudy breaths of the moon, magnificent shapes unrecognizable to her novice intelligence, like strange old galleons of the sea.