Hex: A Novel (14 page)

In the cold garden, when the prince bent over the sleeping princess and commanded her, “arise!” what happened next was not a gradual return to consciousness, not a surfacing. Rather, the princess sat up and shielded her face from him, groped all around her bier until she found her mask and slid it on.

By eleven o’clock the party was in full swing. We had been sneaking drinks for an hour and we were both loose on our feet.

“Let’s go,” Thingy said. “This is boring.”

The party wasn’t boring and I didn’t believe she was bored. The house was filled with noise. The rumble of conversation, a high hysterical laugh from a woman in a tuxedo jacket who was watching a man in a white linen suit as he rolled his eye wildly and ate the carnation he had been carrying in his buttonhole. A joke, I realized, when he laughed too. He bent and lifted the hem of her skirt as if he were going to eat that next and she shrieked, delighted, her dark mouth like a tear in her face.

Elsewhere, a man and a woman were sitting on the couch pressing their foreheads together and an elderly woman with a face like a frozen waterfall was smoking a long cigarette and tipping the ash into her husband’s drink. Thingy’s mother was standing in the center of the room, inclining her head to listen
to a short, bald man whose his head was as brown and peaked as an egg. Thingy’s father was sitting at the piano picking out a jangling little tune with a woman who was jabbing at a single low note and staring very intently at the side of his head.

On the far side of the room from us, a woman was weeping, her face buried in her hands, and the man who was sitting at her feet patted her knee with absentminded regularity. Next to them, another woman was not paying enough attention to her dress. When she bent to set her glass on the end table, or stooped to pick it up, one breast, tanned as a glove, would slip out and hang framed in the deep V of her halter, swinging slightly as she shifted her hips in time to the music. Her nipple was fleshy and brown, like a fig.

The bar tender winked at me when I accidentally caught his eye and pushed a full glass of wine someone had abandoned there to the edge of the counter as he turned away. Thingy drank half and gave the rest to me. She crossed her arms over her bodice as she scanned the room, biting her lip. The room was full and the people in it so intent on each other and themselves that there was no room for her. No Thingy shaped space in which she could stand and be seen. My dear Thing had many qualities, but none of them were modesty, none patience.

“Come on,” she said again. “Let’s go for a walk.”

We slipped out a side door that opened almost directly onto the dune. It was a still night, the moon full and the face in it clearly that of a woman, her mouth open in decorous shock. I was still carrying the wine glass, taking tiny sips of the warm, musty wine and trying not to gag. We left our shoes behind us in the sand and dragged our feet so our tracks looked as if they had been made by someone crawling on all fours along the hissing edge of the surf.

“Where are we going?” I asked Thingy. I was suddenly tired and feeling more and more drained the further we went from the lights of her house.

“Look,” Thingy said. “There’s someone standing under the pier.”

Once there were two girls and one of them was me. That is the part I keep forgetting.

Sometimes, in stories, a girl will look into a mirror and realize the face she has been seeing all along is not herself but a girl from the other world who looks very much like her. When she realizes this she generally has to make one of two choices. She can trap the other girl by tricking her into exposing herself for what she really is. She can enter the mirror after her and hunt her down. In stories, girls are often predators, if carefully disguised ones.

To put it another way: an eastern newt, such as the one we turned up today in the shallows, Ingrid, spends most of its life as an unremarkable olive creature in the bottom of a murky pond. But there is a time of two or three years when this newt is actually a red eft. During this period, the newt-to-be races across the forest floor, rappelling between rocks and burrowing under the leaf mulch, in a brilliant flame-red skin that ripple over its ribs as it breathes. A red eft is poisonous and attention getting. It is looking for a safe home, but this is not how it appears to an outside observer such as a crow or a black tie-snake. Rather, the eft seems to be bragging.

Look at me, how fast and trim, is what the crow hears. Look at me, my dainty foot, is how it sounds to the snake.

This is not to say that we weren’t also perfectly ordinary girls. Children of our time, not so unlike children of any other time, who were encouraged to believe our world would soon end. As children grow, they begin the life-long process of mythologizing their younger selves. “I put my pudgy little hand in my daddy’s big brown one,” a young woman will say. “I gave my mommy a kiss and ran into the woods as fast as my little legs would take me.”

Thingy was no exception to this rule—witness her interminable collections: buttons and plastic rings, lockets bristling with locks of her own hair, pamphlets and mysterious shards of glass—but, to her credit, her own red eft stage came early and lasted an inordinately long time. Oh, she was wild and fair. It seemed to me, following behind her, as if she skimmed across the surface of the earth incandescent with disdain. She was never caught, no one even came close, and she left no trace of her passing: no footprint, no turned stone. There was no way to track Thingy’s progress but, I suppose, myself.

When Thingy saw the other face in the mirror, she murdered it. Every time. It never seemed to occur to her that sometimes that face was mine.

To whit: under the pier. It was a bright night, the moon high and demanding. The sea lathered the sides of the pylons into a froth of sea haze and salt which glimmered in the barnacles’ fans. On our way down the beach, Thingy and I had been flanked by ghost crabs sidling in and out of their dark holes, but here there seemed to be no animate life. Just the concrete and the barnacle encrustations. The creosote stained wood and the tightly shuttered winkles.

As we got closer, the immaterial forms under the pier solidified into three boys, a little older than us, who were leaning against the side of the concrete abutment and watching us approach. Two of them were smoking cigarettes and there was a bottle in a brown paper bag screwed into the sand at their feet. Thingy walked right up to them.

“Hi,” she said, fluffing the skirt of her dress. “Do any of you have a cigarette I could bum?” Of course, they did.

Up close, the boys were much older, closer to being men than we had first expected. Two were tall and very alike, clearly brothers with widely spaced eyes and dark eyelashes, sharp noses and thin mouths that seemed to draw their faces forward into a point. The other boy was the outsider, the instigator. He was shorter, but more muscular. His skin, even in the weird glamour of moonlight, was assiduously browned against his white T-shirt and his face had the homely, dangerous aspect of a mule: all nose and teeth, no humility, no forgiveness.

“My name is Ingrid,” Thingy said, despite the fact that they hadn’t asked. Their only response was a collective shrug, a lingering gaze from the short one that spent as much time on her bare feet as it did her frank, sea-dewed cleavage. There was a sense that we’d walked into the middle of something which had to be suspended due to our presence, a sense of biding time.

“I don’t live here normally,” Thingy said, as if responding to a further questions. “My family owns a summer home, down the beach.” Thingy waited for their reaction and when none came she exhaled an thin line of smoke and lifted the wine glass out of my hand without looking at me as if I were some sort of retainer.

“I think I need a drink,” she said, tilting the glass until the wine pattered a little hollow at her feet. “I’ve finished this one.”
As the boys finally turned their attention on her, really looked, she smiled a smile thin as the crest on a wave and stepped forward, closing the circle, leaving me out.

(The eft was sprinting across the loam, her hide bright, her eye sure. The crow was dazzled; the snake was lulled. And what was I, then? A clutch of eggs? The mud-green mother? When you learn to say thank you, Ingrid, you might say it to me that you will never have to experience that sense of padding I was muffled in for so long. It was as if I was wrapped in layers and layers of gauze. My breath stale in my lungs, my heart slow and sluggish in my chest. I had to wait a long time for my life, but you, my dear, will get to live yours stripped and lean—a bright and furious instant, each of your many instants also your only one. This is a fact of which I would be jealous if I weren’t the one, through whatever circuitous fashion, to bring it about.)

“Ingrid, huh,” said the mule-faced boy, pouring a long shot into Thingy’s wine glass. The smell was both caramel and antiseptic. He passed the bottle to the brother on his right who fitted the neck into his mouth in a way that seemed needlessly convoluted. Once it had made its way around the circle, Thingy passed the bottle back to me, yet, even as I drank, the circle did not bloom open. The liquor clotted in the back of my throat, almost choking me, and I sat in the sand, my back to the concrete abutment, headless of the prick of empty barnacles which I would later find had caught the fine material of Thingy’s borrowed dress and torn it in a hundred tiny places.

“That’s kind of an old fashioned name,” one of the brothers said. He lit a cigarette of his own and I drank from the bottle. This time the liquor went down more smoothly. Something
numbing was rising from my stomach up my throat and to the back of my tongue like a frigid tide. All three boys were wearing khaki shorts and one of the brothers wore a T-shirt with
End-Time Harvest
printed across the chest in squat block letters and underneath that a phone number. I drank again from the bottle. There was sand on the rim, sand in between my teeth. Maybe I had more than one drink, maybe another.

The brothers both wore their hair gelled into a plump swoop that rose from their foreheads like the crest of a water-going bird. A merganser, I thought, and I pictured the bird’s lean hooked beak, its round eyes rimmed in black.

The water, far out but turning with the tide, dashed and foamed under the pier like a dog racing to strangle itself on the end of its line.

“Were you named after your grandmother or something?” the mule-faced boy asked.

“I was named after myself,” Thingy said. She giggled and sipped from her glass.

How could we be so many things? Newts and efts. Fish-eating ducks and coarse-coated mules. Snakes and crows and girls and boys and the sea, which subsumed, and the mountains which marked where we were birthed into these forms and where we would be turned out of them.

Suddenly, as I now know it sometimes happens, I was drunk.

Belly drunk. Bone drunk. Drunk so I felt if I opened my mouth the pulpy mess of my being would push out of me and land in the sand at my feet with a wet thud. With my eyes open or closed I saw the same lurid slur: Thing, smoke, fire point, arrow pier, dark water, dark sand. Somewhere far away, but getting closer, a raging white light as thin as a wire.

“Your friend ok?” said a merganser.

“Is she going to puke?” said the mule.

Oh, Thing—oh mermaid splitting her fishtail, uncoiling her dark length in the surf. Oh, sharp-toothed snout, wall-eye.

No, it was only my dear as she had always been. Only the velvet bodice, her own knees, nicked with razor marks, thudding into the sand on either side of my feet and her hand on my jaw turning my face from side to side.

“Alice,” Thingy hissed. “What are you doing?”

We are well past that, I wanted to say, but there were no words in me. I might have made a sound. I might have made a noise like a howl, but very quiet, very low. The mule and the mergansers clustered behind Thingy and looked down at me from over her shoulder. I could tell I was embarrassing them, though not Thingy who was made of sterner stuff. After all, she had known me when our world was only blood and the gummy slide of fluids. I had felt with her the plug of mucus in her throat and her rage as a slick gloved finger slide into her mouth to scoop it out. She had felt with me the vernix drying in my creases, the amniotic fluid stiffening on me like a second tighter skin. After that, Thingy told me with her stern gaze, we could neither repel nor charm each other. After that, Thingy did not say, but said, there was nothing in this world that could keep us apart.

“Why don’t you go to sleep,” Thingy said and, for the benefit of the mule, helped me by pushing on my shoulder until I tipped, the dress catching and pulling against the concrete as I
slid. I landed in the wet sand, my mouth open, my arm caught awkwardly beneath me.

Then, I suppose, I slept.

This is what I remember from a summer night when I was thirteen:

Where Thingy stands is a bowl of light.

The mergansers preen. One dabbles his bill in the feathers of his chest; one rears back and beats his wings.

“It isn’t that late.”

The water comes hissing to Thingy’s feet, laps her ankles.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

“My mother can tell time by the moon.”

The mule bends and presses his snout to Thingy’s belly. Something dark is in the surf.

Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.

My Thing has a head made of light that floats above her shoulders. There is a song about this. A song I remember.

Something dark is struggling in the breakers.

“Give me another cigarette. Please.”

No, that is the moon.

The mule takes the hem of Thingy’s dress in his teeth and nibbles.

“You’re friend’s going to drown. She’s getting sand in her mouth.”

If I could hear someone hum it. . . If I could hear the first line. . .

“Look! Look!”

The mergansers have beaks like twin needles. Fire-point. Twin lights.

A song about a girl who has the wrong love. A song about what happens next.

When Thingy turns the mule presses his face in the small of her back, mergansers encircle her shoulders with their wings.