Hex: A Novel (13 page)

This is what my father said to me. And with that, my life in his house had come to an end.

It was February when I left, a cold winter. The snow was fresh and my father, who was out of work, had not shoveled. I remember seeing my tracks behind me as I left the house. I remember expecting something more dramatic; droplets of blood steaming in the snow perhaps, but that was all—just the shape of my feet, the closed door, a patter of blue light from the television shifting silently behind the curtains.

I hitched my backpack higher on my shoulders. I had packed a couple of changes of clothes, some books. I hadn’t been to school for four months, which was how old the fetus was, though I thought the two things were unrelated. Rather, at that point, I felt like I knew everything I was ever going to know. As if I had reached my limit and anything new would spill over the edge of my brimming head and sluice across my features like groundwater leaking down a ruined face of the mountain. I didn’t want to make a mess, I remember thinking.

I stood for a long time in my father’s front yard as my shoes soaked through and my toes began to burn, then freeze. Behind the curtains, I could see people walking: my father or Rosellen moving from room to room, but the curtains didn’t twitch, no new light came on and none went out. Then, someone hoisted the venetian blinds in what had once been my brother’s bedroom and sat at the window. It was Rosellen, but she gave no sign that she wanted to communicate with me; no wave, no finger tap on the glass.

She sat in the window and stared as if I were an image on the television screen, a subplot to a story she had invested too much time into following to turn off now. I stared back and for a long time we were like that: each of us expressionless, each of us gray. Then I turned and began to inch my way down the slick hill. I was going to the Feed Store whose lights came in and out of view behind the trees as I walked, and from there I would go to Thalia’s house high on a bald on the south side of Newfound Mountain. I was like an animal then—my mind a gray buzz, my body a bloody socket into which an uneasy life had been plugged. My only thoughts were not to slip and how cold my feet were. I had no idea my real life had begun.

Oh, Push sings the kettle.

Please Push begs the chair.

The mother hears the siren coming up the hill, but it is going to her neighbor’s house who is also expecting a baby, who was also supposed to travel in orderly fashion to the hospital with her husband, but who has panicked at the early pains and called the ambulance instead, waits now in the foyer with her bag in her hand as they pull into her drive.

It is a month too early for the mother and she knows something is wrong. “Wait,” she says and says it louder, “Wait,” trying to call over the birth song which is rising all around her, drowning her in euphony.

But the baby is anxious; it is filled with fear. Something has changed—a light gone out, a dazzle fading—and its absence threatens the baby with a loss that quickens her, makes her rough. Darkness Brilliance Darkness Brilliance. Where is it? She can’t see over this red pounding. She can’t hear over the
rush of waters. It is gone. It is lost. The baby feels, for the first time, emptiness and she is enraged. She screams and the world becomes high and thin. It rushes away from her. She is lost in it, her will almost extinguished, and then she feels a thready tug, a fleet little pull from far away as the Other, the baby can sense it, also screams; as the Other, the baby can feel it, also spreads her new hands against a bright light.

It is the first time the baby has been comforted. It is the first time the baby has been. She lies very still, marveling at the fact of herself, feeling for the Other who is with her, who mirrors her. Who speaks down their shared current: I am I I I. . .I am I.

And this is how my father found me, many hours later, when he came into the house with a hammer in his hand to see his wife lying dead on the floor, his daughter beside her, and there at the window, unmoved by either pity or awe, the dragon, of course.

Who else would it have been?

So you can never claim to have been misled, Ingrid, here is what the Orifice said:

“—indicative of both malevolence and a contradictory desire to please. Furthermore, Subject A’s delusions—classic instances of magical thinking on a gradated scale from the superstitious to the frankly paranoid—adhere to a surprisingly sophisticated symbolic lexicon that she employs with evidence of nascent awareness of their primogenitors in both myth and popular culture. Some of these reoccurring icons, to be elaborated on in Chapter Seven, are: snakes and certain birds, the
moon, a stone which Subject A varyingly describes as gem-like, rough or water-rounded, fire and ash, lost or hindered children, a dominant female figure in many guises, and bees, wasps and other hive-building insects. Though Subject A is highly skilled at oral storytelling, she displays little to no awareness of narrative goals; i.e. the nature of a story as a transformative tool
applied
to an existent reality with the intended outcome of either reinvention or manipulation of the audience’s perception. Rather, she operates as if her highly iconographic personal mythology is a
continuation
of a contiguous narrative line, integrated into the quotidian domestic reality of her life in a sup
ra
natural fashion which overwhelms the “natural,” obliterating rather than rewriting. Thus, the dualism between her bodily self and her consciousness is not Cartesian, but rather mythic: the god (or gods) who have influenced her life are irrational and unapproachable, but she must have done something to deserve their attention. From a diagnostic standpoint, it is clear how this paradoxical self image, at once both at the mercy and in control of larger forces, creates the opportunity for a dangerous abdication of personal responsibility, and furthermore—

—plant produces a stout, blackish rhizome (creeping, underground stem), cylindrical, hard and knotty. It is collected in the autumn after the fruit has formed. It has only a faint, disagreeable odor, but a bitter and acrid taste. The root is an antidote against poison and the bite of the rattlesnake. The fresh root, dug in October, is used to make a tincture. Also known as: Black Snake Root, Rattle Root, Squaw Root, Bugbane—

—The world is suspended at its corners. We have come after a terrible flood. The boy has a wild brother formed from blood
washed in the river. They murder their mother and by dragging her body around the camp they grow the first corn. The bears do not demand of us; the deer give rheumatism; the reptiles make us dream; the birds and insects and smaller animals give disease and make menstruation sometimes fatal to women. The little men transform us and set us to kill the sun—

—which leaves or roots when eaten produce maniacal delirium, if nothing worse. Necklaces of root, when hung about a child’s neck, prevent fits and cause easy teething. Also known as: Henna-bell, Henbell, Hebenon—

—overworn green color; clasping tendrils. Thready strings snipt about the edges. Spokie rundles. Bloody flux—

—running the risk of oversimplification, it is useful to figure the household within the context of a hive mentality. The arbiter of collectivist control (Subject B) is male and asserts a model of behavior whose clear goals are to not only control the necessary health, safety and comfort of what I term here as his “hive,” but also to assert a system of emotional/psychic hegemony through which he believes his essential principles will be replicated in a fractal expansion with the addition of each new hive member; much in the way bees craft additional, identical cells to accommodate the expansion of the colony. Subject A appears to submit to Subject B’s dominance. Indeed, she appears to do so happily which underscores my speculative theory of her causal infantilization outlined in Chapter Two. However, a subconscious conflict has emerged between Subject B’s patrilineal approach and the ardently literal symbolist Subject A’s strong identification with both matriarchal
authority and her perception of collectivist identity as a female construct. Subject B views himself in the hive role of the Queen. In his mindset of almost pathological gender narcissism, there is no conflict between the feminine model and his overt masculine identification. In other words, he has subverted the cyclic, holistic nature inherent in a fractal model of community building in favor of an entropic mode which borrows from traditional Judeo-Christian iconography. He begins the timeline of the community, is able to reinsert himself at will along its continuity, is replicated in all other members of the community, and is the sole hive member capable of causing the termination of the community. Subject A, on the other hand, is unable to blend these two models. Thus, while she submits to Subject B’s dominant will, she seeks another, female member of the hive to stand in as the Queen; albeit a Queen stripped of her decisive powers. This, as a clear result of our long-standing relationship, has come to be myself. Since the introduction of Self and Subject C into the hive community a year prior to this writing, Subject A has bifurcated her subservience to both fulfill the rules surrounding Subject B’s hive expansion and serve the material and emotional needs of Self, her proxy hive Queen. As she figures this psychic schism through her usual narrative escapism, Subject A has become a most unusual sort of narcissist: a hive member that is
aware
of its lack of motility. The only person in all the world, she believes, who is able to know she is not in any way unique—

—untoiled places, overmuch flowing. Kind hereof. Leaves hereof. Untilled places: whitish-green color. Root hereof, roots hereof. Diverse other places. Thready root, mean bigness—

—There was a tribe of root-eaters and a tribe of acorn-eaters with great piles of shells near their houses. In one tribe, they found a sick man dying and were told it was the custom there when a man died to bury his wife in the same grave with him. The sky is an arch or a vault of solid rock. It was always swinging up and down. The moon is a ball that was thrown up against the sky a long time ago. Some say the stars are balls of light, others say they are human, but most people say they are living creatures covered with luminous fur or feathers with small heads which stick out like the head of a turtle. Some stars are called Where the Dog Ran. A dog warned us of the Great Deluge and showed us the place on his neck where the skin had worn off so the bones showed through—

—a solitary, stout, pale stem with tough, strong fibers enclosing a white pith arises from the midst of the felted leaves. Its rigid uprightness accounts for some of the plant’s local names: Aaron’s Rod, Jupiter or Jacob’s Staff—

—“I become a real wolf,” we say. When a rabbit was stuck in a hollow tree, he sang to the children: “Cut a door and look at me; I’m the prettiest thing you ever did see.” The rabbit we know now is only a little thing that came after. The man could not even see the heart in his hands, but he swallowed it and when the girl awoke she compelled herself to go to him and be his wife. “I have sewed myself together. I have sewed myself together”—

—Shoot hereof. Fruit hereof. Washed therewith: other hot regions. Great broad leaves. Decoction thereof. Blue color. Sundry branches, raw humors. Seed hereof. Germ hereof—

—remains to be seen what effect the disintegration of the hive community will have on Subject A. While the study is by no means completed, external factors (including the looming arrival of Subject X) along with Subject A’s increasing destabilization render the situation far too volatile for continuing study—

—She rose and brought half a cake of bread, half a wild apple and half a pigeon. She heard running and the door was flung open and the sun came in. Finally, he stopped and pulled the arrows out of his side. “And now surely we and the good black things, the best of all, shall see each other,” they sang. “A bullfrog will marry you; a bullfrog will marry you,” they sang.

Every summer for one month, Thingy would leave me and go to the beach house her mother and father owned on an island off the coast. She came back from these trips tanned very brown, her hair, eyebrows and eyelashes bleached an impossible color, like spider’s thread which can only be seen in the early morning when it catches the dew. She also returned very salty.

“Lick my wrist,” Thingy said for weeks afterwards, and then, “Eww,” when I pressed the tip of my tongue against her pulse. She pulled her arm away and wiped it on her skirt. But then a few minutes later she said, “But you could taste it, right? That’s the ocean. I brought it all the way back here just for you.”

One year, when Thingy and I were thirteen, her parents agreed to take me along.

The trip took four hours. Mr. Clawson drove and Thingy and I played the cow counting game with him as her mother slept in the passenger seat. The car was new, sleek and black with round silver headlights. It was a car that didn’t have anything to prove. The hood ornament was a cat which slunk down toward the grill as if stalking the road.

“Ten cows,” said Thingy. “I have ten on this side.”

“Pretty good,” said Mr. Clawson, “but look up ahead.” He sped the car up, smoothly muscling around a sedan filled to the brim with a pudding-faced family who all turned almost as one to gawk at us. “It’s a grain silo, Ingrid. All your cows have been lost in a terrible flood.”

We had never played this game before. I think Mr. Clawson was making up the rules as he went along. Every time one or the other of us got up above a ten or fifteen cows he would announce another common highway feature which, depending on what side of the road it was on, would cause either Thingy or my cows to be massacred by some sort of natural disaster. So far our cattle had been blown away by a tornado, burnt alive in a forest fire, dropped into a gaping chasm opened up by an earthquake and now, it appeared, they were drowning in a flash flood. I imagined Thingy’s cows paddling across a wide, quick-moving river, stretching their necks above the brown waters, mooing to each other as they rolled their eyes.

We stopped at a truck stop a couple of hours into the drive for what Mrs. Clawson instructed Thingy to refer to as a ‘potty-break,’ after she had announced to her father that she needed to piss like a racehorse.

“I need to potty-break like a racehorse, then,” said Thingy, making a face at me. The trunk of the car was crammed full of collapsible lawn chairs and folded beach umbrellas, deflated rafts in a delirium of colors (jewel-pink, mint-green, azure, maize), rainbow-striped beach towels, oversized hats, pails and shovels, nets and masks. Already the car smelled like coconut lotion and, increasingly, salt. I had never seen the ocean. For weeks, ever since I found out I was coming along, I had been walking around feeling as if I were carrying my heart in my mouth. As if, should I open my mouth too suddenly, my heart would fall out onto the table and beat there, bouncing up and down on the gingham-checked plastic tablecloth making a mess.

To Thingy and my delight, the bathroom stalls were heavily graffitied and there was a scale that would also tell your fortune for only a quarter.

“You go first,” Thingy said, and I stood on the scale while she put my quarter in the slot.

My fortune said: Your Happiness is Next to You. It also told me my lucky numbers were two and seventeen and gave me the Mandarin characters for pony and water park.

“Your happiness is in a bathroom!” said Thingy, hooting with laughter as she elbowed me off the scale and climbed on.

Her fortune read: You Will Set Off on a Journey, and she was disappointed.

“I already know that,” she said. “I’m already on one. What a gyp.”

“At least your words are cool,” I said. Thingy could now read the Mandarin characters for wizard and Mexico, but she was unimpressed. I offered to trade and she said not to bother.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” she said, but she was wrong.

A couple of hours later we arrived.

The Clawson’s beach house was a part of a private community of near identical houses, tall and flat-faced with tiered porches and ceiling fans whose blades were more often than not shaped like the leaves of giant palms. The houses were painted shades of peach and apricot, turquoise and sea-foam green. They had sandy yards plugged with saw-grass and crossed by creeping tendrils of railroad vine, their moony blooms nodding in the breeze. The Clawson’s house was orange as sherbet and sat right at the end of the cul-de-sac, nearest to the beach.

“Okay,” said Mr. Clawson, getting out of the car and stretching, his hands on the small of his back. “Bring out your dead.”

“Don’t be fatuous,” said Mrs. Clawson, fanning herself with her hat. “It’s too hot.”

After the house had been opened and the car unpacked; after Mr. Clawson had gone from window to window pulling up shades and throwing open sashes and Mrs. Clawson checked every kitchen cupboard and pantry shelf for tracks and trails, nits and eggs; after Thingy and I had dragged our suitcases up the stairs (white carpet with a deep pile, white banisters and white lathes, a white hall and at the top a mirror so it seemed we had beaten ourselves to the bedroom) and stowed our clothes, bathing suits, towels and toiletries in their proper receptacles; after Mrs. Clawson had made a list for the grocery store and Mr. Clawson had dragged the gas grill out of storage; after Thingy had shown me the special spots in the house (where she slid into the kitchen as a toddler and gashed her forehead on the corner of the counter top, where she had sliced her heel on the crushed oyster shell that lined the front walk and, not realizing she claimed, stamped one red foot behind her all through the
house) and taken me into the backyard to shout over the fence at the neighbor’s dog; after Mrs. Clawson had pulled the car back out of the drive, her sunglasses hiding half her face like the mantic eyes of a wasp and Mr. Clawson had dragged the hose out from under the porch and begun to spray rainbow arcs of water into the butterfly bushes, Thingy and I went down to the beach.

How can I say this?

We cut through the front yard to the road, shoeless, stepping carefully around flat pads of cactus. The asphalt was fresh, bubbling in the heat. Thingy bent down and popped a line of tar-bubbles. One, two, three. There was wind coming in from the ocean, lifting the tasseled grasses that grew along the top of the dune and fanning them out toward us. Sand was sifting onto the road from the dune, from the sandy slopes of the yards. The line between the road and the yard and the dune was shifting, fluid. Everything wavered in the sun.

“Come on,” said Thingy, “It’s hot.” She ran ahead of me, mincing on the hot road.

There was a boardwalk: weathered boards, rusty nails which pierced the dune and rose with it so as I walked both the earth and I seemed to rise together, keeping pace with each other. There were flowers on the dunes: yellow daisies, a tough succulent whose red and orange blooms burst like bristles out of its plump green pads. A little mouse ran from the shadow of a dune to shelter under the boardwalk. It was an unusual color. Tawny, almost gold.

I was stalling.

“Come on!” said Thingy, out of sight, her voice catching on the wind and tearing to shreds.

The wind beat my face. Salt. Stinging. I realized my eyes were shut and so I opened them. I saw.

The sea.

It was flat. It was heaving. It swept gray and green and blue out of my sight. The light jumped off its surface as if flung back, repulsed. It came toward me. Was coming toward me. It flung itself toward me, hissing on the sand. Thingy was already down in the surf, running into the waves without even bothering to strip to the bathing suit she wore under her clothes.

“Wait,” I shouted. I was terrified. She was leaving me, diving into a wave that closed like a hand over her silver head. I shouted her name. A sea gull wheeling in the air over the beach and was joined by another, a third. They called like cats. I couldn’t see where the water ended and the sky began. I couldn’t see the end of anything. There was a glare, heat. The gulls came to rest on the sand and sprung up again, back beating their wings to hover near my head. I could see the sheen in their eyes as they cocked their heads to examine me.

“Thingy,” I yelled. I couldn’t see her.

Then she popped up from the trough of a wave and raised one tiny arm to beckon me. She was drifting further out, kicking to the top of a wave and bobbing behind it. Rising again to cup her hands on either side of her mouth and shout.

“Come in,” Thingy said: a speck, my heart’s shadow. “Come on, Alice. The water feels fine.”

Later in the month, Thingy’s parents threw a party. All the neighbors were invited, plus people Thingy’s parents knew who summered on other near-by islands, plus a contingent from
Charleston, plus some of Mr. Clawson’s business partners who were in the country from Germany and needed to be shown a good time. This was how Mr. Clawson put it. It was very important that a good time be had by all, he told us. That meant Thingy and I too, he said. He tried to be funny about it, but we understood that this was a kind of an order.

On the morning of the party, a cleaning crew swept into the house and vacuumed the sand out of every corner, polished every surface and generally scrubbed away any evidence that four people had eaten and slept there for the past two weeks. By the time they swept out again at noon, the house was a gleaming artifact, almost hostile in its intensity. Thingy and I had been banished.

“Go to the beach, or go out back to the pool,” Mrs. Clawson had said to Thingy. “It doesn’t matter to me where you go, darling. I just need you out of the way.”

When we returned for lunch we were just in time to see the maids leave and the catering crew pull up in their refrigerated van. Inside, the house was cool and quiet. Ocean light lay in white slats across the carpet and every object looked as if it had been considered in relationship to every other object, arranged to form sympathetic angles and soothing blocks of negative space. The lacquered clock over the mantle—abstract, made of interposed coral-colored triangles, lacking numbers—had been polished to a high shine and ticked as smoothly as a latch falling into place. The turquoise throw pillows that Thingy and I often stacked on the floor to support our heads as we read or looked at magazines, were placed at precise intervals along Mrs. Clawson’s sweeping white suede sofa, each pillow plumped and then dented as if a casual lounger had just risen to his feet.

Thingy’s mother was sitting in a white wicker basket-chair, her legs crossed neatly at the knee. She gazed out over the room
with a blank, unwritten expression as she twirled a swallow of red wine around the bottom of a glass. Mrs. Clawson was wearing her usual beach gear: linen clam diggers that slide up over her knees as she sat, a melon-orange tank top. Her hair rose in a high wave from her forehead and tumbled over her shoulders, pinned here and there for shape by tiny gold bobby pins. She had not yet put on lipstick and her lips looked exposed, as if they were glimpsed for just a second between shifting screens of fabric. Happenstance, a prurient luck. Overall, she looked exhausted.

“The caterer’s are here,” said Thingy. Mrs. Clawson nodded, but didn’t look up at us.

“So are the florists,” said Thingy, sticking her head back out the door and waving it open and shut as she watched them unpack the van.

Mrs. Clawson sighed and stood up. “Shut the door, Ingrid,” she said to Thingy, “You’re letting in the heat.” She wandered into the kitchen, leaving her glass to sweat a ring onto the end table. We heard the faucet turn on.

“Also we’re hungry,” Thingy yelled after her mother as the first of the caterers pushed past her into the house. They were closely followed by the florists and soon the room was full of busy, shifting bodies, everyone talking at once and all proffering before them foil-covered chafing dishes or buckets of hot-house flowers like offerings they meant to lay on an alter at the feet of a statue of some minor god, bare-breasted, already a little drunk.

At seven-thirty the guests began to arrive, and by eight o’clock the house was full. Thingy and I watched from the top of the stairs. I hadn’t brought anything suitable for a party, so Thingy leant me something from her closet: a rose-pink dress
with a belted waist and short, full skirt overlaid with silver netting. On Thingy it came to mid thigh and showed off the muscular stretch of her legs. On me it was much too big, hanging almost to my knees, the bodice loose and folding in awkward ways as I fidgeted on the stairs. Our feet weren’t the same size, so I had to settle for my old, white sandals with the torn strap my father had mended using kitchen twine and a leather awl.

Thingy looked much older than she was. Her dress was strapless with a deep sapphire bodice and a black velvet skirt which bloomed from her hips like a black tulip. The dress made her seem serene, even chilly, nodding indulgently to the catering staff as she lifted another handful of miniature crab puffs from a silver tray. As for me, I remember thinking I looked okay. Certainly I didn’t look as if I belonged there, but I didn’t look terrible either. I stood in front of the mirror in Thingy’s parent’s bathroom for a long time after Mrs. Clawson had finished our makeup and gone to supervise the last minute bar setup. The mirror was large and oval with an ornate frame featuring an old-fashioned cornucopia motif replete with tumbling grapes and thieving sparrows perched as if to take flight. Someone had spray painted it silver and in places the paint was beginning to chip away. The effect was as if the frame had contracted a skin disorder or as if it were an enchanted garden, frozen in time, slowly remerging beneath a film of melting snow.

In the center of the garden was my face. Thingy’s mother had chosen a very pale green shadow, shimmering like the wings of a moth, and outlined my eyes with slightly darker green liner. She had swiped my eyelashes with a single coating of brown mascara and left my cheeks alone. “Let’s not overdo it,” she said.

It was still me in the mirror: my sallow cheeks and slightly off kilter eyes, but there was something else beside. It was as if
I was wearing a thin mask that moved as my muscles moved, came down over my eyelids when I blinked. The mask did not obscure my features, so much as it redefined them. Underneath was my nose, but the mask’s nose was for something other than smelling. Underneath were my lips, but the mask’s lips felt no compulsion to open or smile. I put my fingers to my cheeks and pinched them, watching as the blood rushed momentarily to the surface. I understood, maybe for the first time, that this was how people went about in the world, how it was possible.