The Elementals (12 page)

At night when Lauren was in Dallas’s room I locked the door, put on my headphones and blasted the sound. Metric and Moby and Massive Attack and Miike Snow. Sigur Rós and PJ and Halloween Hotel. And I flung myself like a fool around the room with my phantom brown-eyed best girl friend until I was shaking like a
danse macabre
skeleton.

I wondered, then, if it were really possible to dance, under some bitter and alluring enchantment, until your toes were gone.

14. The cold reminder of the dead

“‘I took one look at her head and knew she was the one.’”

In my creative writing class Kyle Langley read a piece about a serial killer.

He took the killer’s POV and wrote in first person, present tense about how the guy stalked this woman and killed her and then decapitated her, but for the first two-thirds it read like a love story.

In every scene I saw a girl with Jeni’s face.

I couldn’t breathe, had to get out of there. My legs jiggled manically under the table as Kyle continued to read. When he was through, Professor Portman nodded sagely. He was graying at the temples and his hairline was receding a little but his features were classically handsome, like an actor playing a professor in a movie. Jessica Steinholtz gazed at him with a half-smile on her glossy lips.

“Good work, Kyle. It’s very effective. Creepy as hell. You get us right inside his head and then when we realize where we are,
bam,
it’s too late. I think some people may be offended by this piece.” He panned the table with his cool blue eyes and I looked down quickly. “But that can be the beauty of something. When you know you got ’em.”

My stomach cramped with hunger and with fear. All I wanted was to hear the clock tower chime.

When class was finally over I watched Jessica gather her things slowly and come over to Portman, who stood at the back of his room by his desk. There was something so intimate about the way they leaned in to speak to each other, about the way his gaze dripped over her body, that I looked away quickly. She laughed and tossed back her golden hair.

I thought,
Am I just a prude, jealous bitch? Who needs to get laid? (Where is John? Why hasn’t he called?) Or is there something fucked up about having to see your forty-something teacher fall in love with an eighteen-year-old student in public?

I really wasn’t sure which was true. Maybe both. I walked out of the classroom, down the dim hall, down the steps and into the day. I had my iPod on, listening to Björk—her otherworld voice making me feel more vulnerable, lost, in the wrong place. The sun hurt my eyes and I wished I had sunglasses.

I felt a hand on my arm and jumped, thinking it was Kyle Langley, maybe. But it wasn’t.

It was John Graves.

I had never been this close to him in the daylight before. It was hard to believe he was really there. His skin looked very pale and he wore sunglasses; I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

I reflexively kept walking, fueled by a blast of adrenaline. It seemed dangerous, somehow, to be speaking to him here. I couldn’t let the worlds blend; I might lose the one I cared about more.

“May I speak to you?”

“Not here,” I said as I kept walking.

He reached out suddenly and grabbed my hand, a bit roughly, and we walked along toward the edge of campus this way. I followed behind him, stumbling a little. My legs were still shaking. I needed to eat something.

As if he’d read my mind he said, “We’ll get lunch.”

We made our way down Telegraph and then he turned and pulled me through a bamboo gate to a small Japanese garden. The restaurant was quiet, cool and dark and we sat at a booth where the waitress brought us steaming green tea the color of murky jade.

“How are you?” he asked. He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes looked tired. “We just got back.”

“How’d you know where I was?” As I said it, a queasiness stirred in my solar plexus, a mixture of pleasure and mistrust.

“You told us your classes. I know the English department pretty well. I’ve been here for years.”

“Then why don’t I see you more?”

“I mostly work at night.”

I tugged reflexively on my ponytail holder and let my hair down around my shoulders.

“Why are you so suspicious?” He sighed. “I really missed you.”

I didn’t answer, couldn’t tell him how much I’d missed him, too.

The waitress came to take our order and he asked her for rice, miso soup, edamame and vegetable tempura. He turned to me. “Is that good?”

I nodded. My mouth was already watering.

When she left he said, “I was worried about you the other night. I thought about you the whole time we were away but I wanted to give you a little space. I know it was intense.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I looked into the liquid jade in my cup and lowered my voice. I was afraid that if I expressed any frustration with him for not contacting me, he’d leave.

“How’s it going?” he asked. “In school and everything?”

I shook my head. “I don’t get it. I don’t get why you guys care.” I really meant,
Why didn’t you contact me while you were gone? Where were you?

He reached across the table and took my hand. I startled but let him hold it for a few seconds before I drew it away.

“You’re important to us, Ariel.”

“Why? You don’t even know me. I’m nothing. I’m like any other girl you could find on campus except probably less interesting.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Then why?”

“Listen, Ariel. You don’t have to question me so much. Or yourself. Tania and Perry and I are just freaks who happen to have the resources to indulge ourselves more than most people. We don’t want to scare you. But I’m drawn to you. I wanted to know you better. You seem important to me, almost familiar, and I want to understand that connection better, okay?”

The moment was too intense; I was relieved when the waitress brought our soup. We ate in silence for a while. I didn’t really want to talk, I didn’t want answers; I just wanted the sensation of warm food in my belly. When we’d finished the meal he said, “There’s something I’d like to show you.”

I squinted at him. “What?”

“Angels.”

*   *   *

We took BART into Oakland and got to the graveyard in the late afternoon. The winter sun was hazy gold through pale clouds. Gray tombstones and crypts stretched out across the hillside among the oaks, pine trees and ginkgos. The silence of the dead hung over everything, even in the exposing light of day. As John had promised, the angels were all there with their eyes raised to the faded blue sky.

“I love this place.” He walked beside me, trailing his long fingers, grazing the stones. “I never understood why people don’t.”

I moved closer to him so that our arms almost touched. My knees weakened and I lost breath; it was hard to continue up the hill. The air smelled pungent with pine needles.

“I like them,” he said, and I couldn’t look at him. I had to focus on my feet on the ground. “People used to come and dance. They weren’t always just austere.”

I imagined what it would be like to dance with John in the graveyard, to dance on the graves. Did he want to dance on the graves?

“They’re comforting, too,” he went on. “In a weird way. They remind me of being part of nature. Like what the Romantics believed. That we go back when we’re ready. No heaven or hell.”

We walked in silence for a while; the only sound was my breath and heartbeat and our feet scuffing through the dirt and leaves.

“I can accept my death, better than other people’s,” I said. “But the part that’s hard is not getting to be with who you love. That’s what I can’t…” My voice trailed off into the rapidly cooling air.

“Maybe you’ll be with them, just in a different form. Maybe you already were together with the people you love before this.”

“Sometimes I feel like that.” I wanted to make him stop walking and put my arms on his shoulders, feel the place where his deltoid curved in, the heat through his clothes. I wanted to feel his lips brush against mine like he was turning on a switch that would send the floodlights burning through the darkness inside of me. But maybe he was the darkness.

And he kept walking like he had a destination. “What do you mean?”

“I do feel like I knew my mom, before. And Jeni.”

“Ariel?” He stopped walking. “Talk to me.”

I shook my head and a harsh little laugh escaped my mouth. “She never came home. I can’t let it go. I keep thinking I have some kind of lead and it’s nothing. Nothing is anything.”

“I’m sorry.”

Tears clogged my throat. “I believe there are people who are missing parts of us. But what happens when they’re gone?”

He was standing in front of a small tombstone at the crest of the hill. The leaves of the oak tree shadowed his face with shifting patterns.

“You find other missing parts?” He had taken off his sunglasses and his eyes met mine then with the full impact of their green and gold. It was like looking into water or a thicket of trees in a forest. I was afraid of getting lost there like in the eyes of the stone angels, and, at the same time, I wanted to get lost.

I turned away. “Maybe.” Across the hills lay the large crypts of millionaires. Why would they need such a palace? I thought of the bones under our feet. I thought of Jeni. How I wished for her to be found unharmed, how I wished for her to be found, and finally, secretly, shamefully, now, when it had become too much, for her bones to be found. Just so we would know.

“Maybe it’s us,” he said.

Us? He hadn’t said “me.” Did he mean Tania and Perry, too? John Graves. With me in a graveyard. I hadn’t even thought of the irony. Suddenly my back stiffened and I shivered as a breeze moved through the pines and oak trees. The cold reminder of the dead.

He knelt down by the tombstone and ran his fingers over the words engraved there. It was a very small stone. I couldn’t see what it said. But John was staring at it like he was trying to crack it with his gaze. He sat cross-legged in the dirt and put his head in his hands. His hair fell across his face.

I came around and stood beside him. I could see the front of the tombstone now. It said,
LUCY ELIZABETH WALCOTT 1910–1918.
There was a small statue of a sleeping lamb.

A child’s tomb. Jeni didn’t have a grave. Her parents kept waiting for her to come back.

“I never understood the importance of marking a grave. I believed in fire, ashes, throwing them into the water, whatever. Not this. But something happens to you when you sit here this way.” There was a note of deep sadness in his voice I hadn’t heard before.

I sat next to him. “What? What’s wrong?”

He opened his mouth as if to speak, then shook his head—not a
no
but as if to push something away. “Tell me something about you, please.”

“I’ve been looking for some sign of Jeni. I keep this notebook but there’s nothing that means anything. Just all my fears.”

“Maybe we can help you look,” he said.

I hardly heard him over the onslaught of feelings pounding blood to my head. “And my mom’s sick.” I hadn’t planned on telling him but it was a relief; there had been no one to tell.

His eyes glimmered in the sunlight, so deep like water where you can’t find the bottom. “I’m so sorry.”

“The C word.”

He nodded. “What do they say about it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to know anything.”

“Maybe it would help you to know?”

I shook my head, thinking,
Maybe it would help me to know more about you, too. But I don’t really know if I want that, either.
“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Yes, you should have.” He reached his hand out and brushed my arm with the tips of his fingers. I wanted to grab onto him but it felt like if I did he’d have to pry me loose.

I didn’t want to be there anymore. I knew the spirits of the dead were already clamoring, disturbed by our voices.

“Can we go now?” I said. I should have just told John how much I missed him when he was gone, how glad I was that he was back, that they were all back, but I kept as silent as the stone angels and their charges.

15. The moon, the goddess, the dark world

After John said good-bye to me at the Berkeley BART station, I went back into my trance. Every morning before class I pounded my feet along the pavement, as hard as I could, running up into the hills and along the trails of Strawberry Canyon, around the stadium and the pool, among the oak trees by the creek bed, over the piles of fallen stones. Around Indian Rock. Morning fog burned away and hawks circled over my head. My mother loved hawks, maybe because my father looked a little like one with his slightly hooked nose and fierce, dark eyes. She was his opposite. A dove. I didn’t want to think about it, about them. I wanted to pound all thoughts out of my body.

Melinda Story found me one day as I was leaving Professor French’s class. We had moved on from Yeats to Ezra Pound and that day I was still under the spell of
The Cantos
inside my thick, orange book. The mysterious words and symbols sometimes felt like incantations and sometimes like the ramblings of a fascistic madman. Professor French had been discussing Pound’s descent into madness. I wondered how connected the poet and the madman were. You could only love the moon, the goddess, the dark world so much without waking before they made you forget that day existed.

“I’ve been wondering how you are.” Melinda had that worried look on her face again.

“Oh, good,” I said as matter-of-factly as possible. “You?”

“I was going to ask if you wanted to come to my apartment for dinner. You look like you could use a home-cooked meal.”

I thought immediately, guiltily, of the food I’d eaten at John’s house. The only food I wanted now. How could anything compare?

“And there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about,” she said.

There was an element of intensity with which she said it that made me nod.

“So this weekend then?”

*   *   *

Melinda lived near the Oakland border. I took a bus along Martin Luther King, past the police station, and found her place, a small upper-floor apartment in an old building. Inside, the wooden floors were covered with rugs and colorful pillows were stacked on the futon and the floor. Chopin was playing, my mom’s favorite composer. And Melinda was into orchids, like my mom. They were grouped by the large picture window—which let the early evening in—observing me like shy little stick puppets. It wasn’t easy to stop thinking about my mother. I wondered how it would be when she was gone, how hawks and orchids and Chopin would stab at me like weaponry.