Hex: A Novel (24 page)

Unless you’re the sort of girl who is curious, the kind who won’t take no for an answer, who sneaks down the hall in her bare feet to eat the last slice of cake in the dark, who doesn’t clean up her crumbs.

In that case, I’ll tell you her name, but nothing further.

It was Alice, of course. Alice Small.

And the Orifice said:

Do You Love Horses? Are You Going to Heaven or Hell? Good News! Cockatiel Confessions—Everything You’ve Heard Is True! Plus, the Marvelous Cichlids of Lake Malawi. The Who, Why and How of Talking. Plus, Our Amazing Spaceship Earth. Care and Feeding Tips. Safe Branches for Perches. I Wasn’t Sure Whether I’d Enjoy the Good News. Rush! Toxicity Info. Safe Moving Day. Baby Cories, Dojo Loaches. Essential Chemistry Needs for Popular Species. Rabbitfish. Puff Up or be Eaten. True Story: I’m a Junior Endurance Champ. Inside! The Vasa
Parrot Profile. Stressed Out? Plus, Territorial Aggression. 2 Tricks: Climb the Ladder, Ring the Bell. Too Hot? Too Cold? Why Does God Allow Disasters? Good News! Good News! Would a Compassionate, Merciful God Inflict Excruciating Pain and Torment on Human Beings in Terrifying Hellfire for all Eternity? Isn’t it about Time You Discovered the Truth?

Today we went into town, all together. The men are foragers; they did the shopping. The women, myself and yourself, Ingrid, you were there, we went to the Laundromat.

Jacob is a man to whom it has never occurred he might lose his mind. He doesn’t believe in losing his mind and so it will never happen to him. Daniel is a man who sees his mind all around him—in objects, in other people’s expressions. I have seen Daniel cut a pear in half and sit there stunned by it. I have seen him reach out to touch something like a watering can or a silk flower, his finger trembling with anticipation, and then just stop. Not touch it at all. The object becoming a
symbol to him of something far larger inside himself that he cannot see.

It makes for an uneasy pairing. It’s a wonder they can get along at all. Yet, they are friends, Ingrid, and I think honest ones. Daniel walks slightly behind Jacob. He keeps his eyes on the back of Jacob’s head. Jacob responds to Daniel the way he does to everything: with certainty, with uninhibited control. One is my husband and one is my lover. I thought about this as I put their shirts in the washing machine and smoothed their socks flat on the folding table.

Someone knocked on the window. I looked up and it was my father.

The Laundromat is like a terrarium. There is the same faint curve to the glass windows which trap the heat of machines and bodies, and a tendency toward obscuring mist. They both have the same iconography of arcane objects—carts and metal hangers, pirate chests, machines that dispense powder and ones that dispense colorful liquid, miniature motion-activated tiki gods—and the same general attitude of frozen display I observed in the frogs and green lizards kept in school to teach us the value of scientific detachment.

Today, the Laundromat was mostly empty: just you and I and an elderly couple who I didn’t recognize. They were both overweight, both with the same creamy skin that stretched over their fatty bodies as if it were a glove they were pulling on. The man was having a problem with his breathing. His breath sounded as if it were being artificially forced in and out of his body and he couldn’t seem to stand all the way up. He walked from the washer to the dryer and back again breathing in that fashion, curled into himself, as his wife murmured in the corner. She was
folding his underwear. A pile of it sat fresh and airy and white in her lap.

My father crossed the room with the same impatient grace he has always had. He doesn’t look much older. Astonishing. All these years have passed for him too and yet he looks to me just as he did when I was a child and could lean into his warm chest, smell his smell and listen to his thumping heart. And yet I am so different. And you, Ingrid, you hadn’t even begun.

“Is this it?” he asked. It seemed he had not yet looked at me. He went right to your basket. He put his finger in your fist. “This is the baby,” my father said.

When I was young my father took Thingy and I to a circus which had set up in the vacant lot across from Abbot’s. We went early, an hour before the show and he walked with us between the brightly colored caravans and smaller tents where the circus performers and their animals lived. We saw a goat standing on a wooden spindle and two elephants, chained at the ankles, twining their trunks under and around each other while they gazed off in opposite directions. We saw a trio of trained dogs with wicked skulls and puffy blonde tails. The dogs were the only animals that responded to us. They were leashed to a wire that stretched between a blue caravan with an ornately curved red roof like a Chinese pagoda and a jumbo RV hung about with silver and orange bells. When we approached them, the dogs yipped and raced back and forth along their line. They weren’t afraid of us, but rather rejecting us. They were too highly trained, too intelligent: dogs that could walk like a man and choose from a platter of thimbles which one concealed a pea. They knew who we were. The audience. The dumb marks. Thingy wanted to pet them anyway and chased after them, her hands outstretched,
jelly slippers flashing in the last light as the day began to fail. It was time for the show to start.

The circus was a cruel place. I felt assaulted by it, as if my eyes were being pushed back into my head by a pair of massive thumbs, but also wildly excited. The show had not yet begun when we took our seats in the bleachers high on the side of the central tent. The lights were still bright and everyone was talking: mothers and fathers, so many children the air fluttered with their high thin voices as if their voices had transformed the air into a thousand pairs of wings. I suppose I was an unusual child. Highly strung. It must have been hard for my father to know what to do with me. I think I was often hard for my father to recognize. Sometimes when he came into a room in which I already was his eyes would slide over me as if I had unwittingly perfected some blend of camouflage and crypsis: my skin taking on the pattern of the couch cushion, my real eyes concealed beneath huge, flaring spots that whorled on my forehead. “Where’s Alice?” he might ask the Nina or the Sainte Maria, but I would be right there, sitting beside him, my fingers in my mouth and skin as cold as a frog’s.

My father settled Thingy and I in our seats and left to go buy us all sodas and popcorn. “Don’t move,” he said, leveling one square, brown finger in Thingy’s face and slowly moving it over into mine. “Don’t talk to anyone,” he said to me. Oh, my father. I loved him. I wanted always to touch him. My hand on his knee or in the crook of his elbow. My hand on the back of his neck where it looked like a blob of Vaseline against the burnt brown creases of his skin.

“I want extra butter on mine,” said Thingy and my father laughed as he left us and picked his way down the rickety bleacher stairs.

He wasn’t back when the show began, the lights falling suddenly and pitching the tent into blackness wherein the adults gasped and the children, wild and unbidden, screamed. Thingy and I held each other’s hands. A spotlight came on. It wavered across the bleachers, illuminating the audience as if it were a long, white finger searching for its place in a book. Sometimes the spotlight would pause or go back for a closer look and whoever was caught in its bleaching light would have a few moments to shift uneasily in their chair, some of them hiding their faces in their hands, some of them, the children, waving. I remember thinking as the children across the tent from me beamed and waved how few teeth everyone had. There were so many holes in the other children’s faces. So many holes in mine which I worried with my tongue as the light dipped down to the packed sawdust floor of the central ring, failed to find what it was looking for and began to travel through the bottom rows on our side of the tent.

“I hope it doesn’t land on us,” said Thingy, squeezing my hand. The light swept up the rows just below us, so bright and obliterating it seemed to be erasing the people it cast upon rather than illuminating them. “It will be horrible,” she said, turning to me, her eyes wide and very dark. “It will be so hot.”

I had thought of the light as a cold thing—it looked cold to me, a concentrated spear of moonlight, well-oiled metal—but I saw in an instant that Thingy was right. It was a hot light, white hot. The whitest, hottest heart of the sun blooming outward, sweeping away everything in its path as it grew. There was nowhere to go. We gripped each other’s hands and panted as the children in the row below us were swept into the light, screaming as it passed over them, raising their hands into the air.

But of course, when it did reach us, nothing happened. We squinted for a moment, blinked. Green roses bloomed in our
vision as the light moved away and left us again in the dark. We had been wrong, but we didn’t know it. We were children, right on the edge of an adult reckoning, adult guilt, but still buoyant in a world of hazy possibility. We were adrift, tied to the rocky bottom only by one ankle with a mooring so thin at any moment it could be snapped like a strand of brown kelp and we would be swept into another world, the world below this world, or the one below that.

We didn’t feel foolish; we felt lucky. Thingy laughed with relief and pressed her lips against my cheek. The show began. In a way, this is what it felt like when I first met Jacob, only that time the light landed on its target. More like a thumb than a finger, it turned out, moistened as if to turn a page.

Once, when Jacob was eight, his Uncle Robert brought his father home stretched out in the back seat of his own car. This wasn’t an unusual occurrence: his father not returning to the house, but being brought; Uncle Robert steering the car around the road’s hairpin turns with one hand, the other arm cocked out the window as if he owned both the car and the afternoon; the sun suspended in a long, leaking evening; the day panting hot until a hot night came down like a cardboard box trapping everyone inside; the stars airholes poked with a pin.

I know nothing about the house Jacob’s father was brought to. There are no photos and the only location I have is north, but not too far north. Another state, but the same blue mountains. Similarly, I know nothing about the mother who stood on the porch or the child who ran halfway out into the yard and then stopped, warned away by some rasp in his father’s breathing or by the flaccid nature of his father’s thigh inside his jeans. Not dead, but dead drunk. Not dead, because if so the child could
come and touch the body, could feel in the space just above the skin where the armor of the self had crumbled the way a cicada shell would crumble if stroked with too eager a finger tip.

Perhaps Jacob’s house was one of many identical houses clustered in the hollow, each of them with a hall linking the front door directly to the back so looking through the screen was like looking through a telescope. Perhaps there was a clothesline in the front yard, an upturned wooden crate that was once used to transport lettuce. Perhaps the whole area was thick with pines and the ground carpeted with their needles and their amber scent in the air, twining through even the scent of garbage and motor oil, cooking grease and wafts of his mother’s perfume.

I could imagine anything, because Jacob tells me nothing. Was he a pretty boy? Was he good? I think he was watchful, his yellow eyes unblinking from the first. I think he was an unnerving infant, but he was one of many—at least six sisters, another one who is only ever described as the baby. Perhaps at night, Jacob’s mother stood over each of her children’s beds and felt their features in the dark, her hands fumbling over their faces on the pillow. This one the eldest girl, right where she should be; this one the baby, a young teenager now, but still sucking the corner of his blanket into a nipple molded by the roof of his mouth. When she got to Jacob, I imagine she felt his forehead and then the bridge of his nose, his chin—weak like his Uncle Robert’s—and then his eyelashes fluttering like moths against her palm, the eyes open though unseeing. The boy asleep, but refusing to be blind.

I come back again and again to the boy standing in the yard watching as his uncle drags his father out of the car and lets him fall into the dirt. Uncle Robert worked in the mines. So did Jacob’s father. So did the neighbors on both sides and the ones
next to them, and behind, and before. The mines radiated out around the boy like the threads of a web. On every strand someone is struggling, bouncing the web up and down. At eighteen, Jacob too went underground. It wouldn’t have been much of a story except for that, at twenty-two, he came back up.

Underground, Jacob wore a reflective vest and a yellow hardhat whose lamp he could turn on and off by twisting the lens. He was a bucket man, part of a small, mobile crew-for-hire who moved up and down the mountains tunneling under the surface of used-up strip mines for the deeper seams that kinked through the rock. The crew was composed of: Harry, the foreman, Pete, who ran the big machines, Lotho, a wiry black man whose muscled arms gleamed as if, beneath the coal dust, were a denser, radiant stone, and Piro, the foreigner whose perpetually runny nose carved tidal channels through the black powder that clung to his luxuriant red moustache.

In every shaft the miners strung electric lights as they dug. These hung drooping at the roofline, suspended from a tough orange extension cord. The bulbs themselves were in cages like canaries which exuded yellow light instead of song. The lights were powered by an external generator, but the system was unreliable, often shaken out of service by the chunking and grinding of the continuous miner as Pete steered it into the rock face, the teeth of its rotating drum ripping the coal from the seam. When the generator went out, all the men were plunged into a momentary darkness. This was so total it seemed for just a moment as if the deafening sounds of the machine, their own breathing, the groan and shift of the rock above their heads were also extinguished though the Miner still dug, the conveyor still turned, the bucket suspended forgotten at the end of Jacob’s arm—his arm
itself forgotten, unnecessary to the beautiful, dark, beating self that was here, for just a moment, warm and spreading in a world that could not distinguish its borders—still filled and overfilled and spilled out broken rock over the toes of his boots. Then, one by one, the other men would twist on their headlamps and bob about in the shaft like jellyfish, their distance impossible to gauge. The silence would be revealed to be horrendous noise and Lotho, standing behind him with the bin, would say, “Woah! Wake up, Jakey. Where’ve you been?”

At night, when the machines finally came to rest but before retiring to the trailers they bunked in, the crew hunkered down in the slag heaps and lit bituminous clinkers on fire in the great metal claw of the backhoe. Then, as the coal exhaled its boggy gasses (peat and black water, the shimmering chitin of Jurassic dragonflies, the curled fronds of ferns) the men passed around a bottle. Some nights they told stories.

One night Piro told a story about twelve brothers who lived beside a lake somewhere near the village where he grew up. When the war came, as it does to all villages, the brothers were conscripted into service and when they returned many years later one of them was missing some vital part.