Wonderland (2 page)

Apparently he speaks English, and he’s thirsty.

He does have a gut, it turns out, but in a while I discover that over his belly button, unafraid and rather large, are the letters
AMOR.
“Who was this for?” I say, tracing them with my forefinger, still in the cut-off gloves, my hand just beneath the hem of his rucked-up T-shirt. I am nervous, not nervous, nervous, making my way down the steep slope into the first valley of the
M.
This is where the tour properly begins, right here, where the point of the
M
is lost in a fold of this stranger’s skin. This is the way in. I like the way he smells. My pulse quickens. I used to do this; it was part of it, part of the mystery of it. Not a dare, not a conquest, more like heading down an unnamed street.

He shakes his head. “No one. Long story.” I ask him, my forefinger moving slowly around the
O,
which team he’s rooting for in the World Cup, and he tells me, and I instantly forget. Ohio? Oostan? He watches my face, holding still, while my finger coasts around the belly of the
R.
He pulls his shirt all the way over his head, smiling.

We move to the borrowed bed. There, on his back, his eyes change. I can see the wolf in them. He doesn’t ask me who I am or what I’m doing here or why I called out to him. When I kiss him, he puts his arms over his head, looking me in the eye. The scent of him wafts up. He has a small, old scar just above his left eyebrow. His expression is cool, appraising—partly as if he expects this, but also as if he might believe that the world is like this, it can kiss you or kill you at any second, and you must never turn away from either possibility. If a woman whistles to you from a blue window, you go up, no matter what might be waiting at the top of the stairs. Perhaps he has his unnamed streets as well. Or maybe it’s because we’re in Christiania; in the ruins of the future, you do whatever. Or maybe he knows this house, knows who lives in it. Maybe it’s his house. Maybe they’re his sleeping dogs. Or maybe he grew bored of not fixing the bike. I am pleased that I remember how this goes, that I can still do this, the ride is starting, though before—before, everything moved much faster somehow, things were blurrier.

Now the clock ticks in the cold room. The moments unfold with each tick. His hands are large, warm. His breath smells of beer and tobacco and of a spice I don’t recognize. I am naked, but I keep the gloves on. The sheets are rough. His belly is still cold. He turns us over and I get a shock. His feet are Simon’s feet: wide-toed, flat. I bite my lip, getting goose bumps. I stop, then I rally. Fine. Is this Simon’s joke on me? He’s got Simon’s feet. I’ll give him Simon’s fuck. The thought seems to warm me up a little.

He pauses, looks into my face. “You’re on the poster,” he says. “In the square. Wonderland.” His
r
is so soft, buoyed on a long bridge of air, it all but disappears.

“Yes.” I see now that he is older than I thought, perhaps in his late thirties, early forties. Like me. Small lines around his eyes, smoker’s teeth. Is that Simon’s tooth, too, that pointy, faintly yellowed one? I try to pull him closer, but he holds himself away, looking at me.

“You are the singer?”

“Yes. I guess. It’s been a while.”

“I used to sing, too,” he says. “It’s been a while.” He smiles. His hand cups my breast, he puts his mouth there as well; his fingers are chapped, one thumbnail is black-and-blue. Simon’s feet churn at the bottom of the bed, too far away. I try to touch Simon’s pointy tooth with my tongue, but I can’t find it. I look harder, getting warmer. If I can’t have Simon, I want the wolf, though the wolf keeps darting away, turning into the bicycle-fixing man, then back into the wolf, then back into the bicycle-fixing man. I chase the wolf, biting his ear, his shoulder, a kind of whistling for the animal, the animal arrives, he springs.
AMOR
skims my belly.

But just then, carried by the wolf, I am pierced by sadness. As if the wolf has bitten. My knees shake. I grip this other man’s shoulder blades with my half-gloved hands.

He turns back into the bicycle-fixing man. The wolf is gone, Simon is gone. He rolls over, sighs. “Maybe I will come to your concert,” he says.

“Sure,” I say, though I don’t want him to. I want him to leave now. I feel tired. What time is it in New York? What time is it here, for that matter? “What’s your name?”

“Mads.” He spells it, but it sounds like
maaas, moss, mass,
an exhalation, a conjunction.

“I’ll put you on the guest list, Mads. Listen, I’m already late.” I kiss him. Animal scent. The smell of coffee from downstairs subsumes it. I sit up, wrap the blanket around myself. It is soft and finely woven—someone’s indulgence. It smells faintly of Mads’s sweat.

Mads puts his shirt on last, disappears down the stairs. Shuffling to the kitchen in the blanket, bare feet on the cool floor, I empty what’s left of the beers into the sink, set the bottles on the wooden counter. There is the licorice on the counter—black twists, loose, like flower stems. So unlike the far more slender, never entirely straight white lines of the past. I take a black twist and put it in my mouth. The long gray hounds haven’t woken up this entire time, as if enchanted. Are they van Stavasts, as Boone said? Schiffeners? If they have another special name, a special breed, I don’t know what it is. A utopian breed, I guess. I kneel down to stroke them, feel their heavy, rough paws. One wakes up and licks my hand. Not wolves, either, these two. Are there wolves in the free state? In the thickets of trees somewhere? Are they happy? When I stand up and look outside a few minutes later, the bicycle is still there, upended, solitary. The front wheel, spokes shining, turns slowly in the breeze. It occurs to me to take the bike, box it up and send it to Jim, my ex. A little girl with blond hair leads a white horse, bridled but unsaddled, down the dirt lane. The horse flicks his tail. I feel jittery, skittery, unsatisfied, though I am not, technically, unsatisfied. I wish I were as round as that wheel, but instead I am like the seeking line of a graph, graphing something that is rising and falling unevenly. If Mads is Amor, does that make me Psyche? She went on the road, too. She had a journey to make.

What if I just stopped now, before the inevitable losses, the bumps that are sure to come? Wrapped in the blanket that smells of the stranger I just fucked, standing at the blue window salvaged from somewhere else, I see it: if I lived here, if Mads were my husband, if this were our house, if I dwelled here, with him, in the ruins of the future. I would know where and why he got that Gothish tattoo over his belly button, maybe I was even there when he got it, a little annoyed, it was taking forever, just wanting to go home, bracing my legs against the wall in the cold tattoo parlor in Munich, both of us drunk. In the days when we drank together, too often. Those gray hounds—Igor and Elgor—are our hounds, one of them had a thyroid operation last year, the other is afraid of mice. Right now, our daughter, our son, are at what passes for a school in Christiania; our son, half feral and with hooded gaze, is never off his skateboard. That bicycle is mine; Mads was supposed to have fixed it weeks ago; I need it to get across the island to my job at the bakery construction site. I’m the site manager. That’s why I have these fingerless gloves, I need to be able to write and handle tools, and even in this other life I get cold easily. The indulgent blanket was my extravagance. And yesterday was a holiday and today the lumber didn’t arrive, so. A beer, an afternoon fuck; later, maybe, we’ll walk down to Pusher Street and get a plate of noodles. We like it here in the ragtag remains of this big, failed idea for humanity. At night we sleep face to face in our wooden bed, his arm heavy on my hip, as if, even now, he’s afraid of losing me to the wind. I’ve had my troubles; so has he. This island is our agreement about something, our aging optimism.

I reluctantly take off the blanket and wash between my legs, dress. For my comeback tour, I have an outfit, constructed by my friend Fritz, that makes me look like a knowing stork. It is a tight black sheath of a skirt, quite short, to show off my long legs. I am to wear this with black stockings or striped stockings or, if it’s hot, no stockings. The shoes are made of thick black straps with fetishistically high white heels. They grip my feet, heavy as horseshoes, cleverly weighted in the front; they weren’t cheap, but it is almost impossible to fall in them. The top is also tight, very, blue-black, and it covers me from wrist to neck to hip. Fritz told me months ago to keep growing my red hair, and now that it is well past my shoulders, I have three styles: a tightly banded braid; entirely loose; and a flowing arrangement that involves ten bobby pins and pomade that comes in a little raspberry-colored tube. Fritz, who looks like a sensei and dresses in small, extraordinarily expensive rags that clear his ankles, is always right about these things. I wrap myself in this outfit (black stockings): swaddling cloth, armor, brace. I go with the braid. When I look at myself, done, in the long mirror in the bedroom of the borrowed apartment in Christiania, I see a woman who looks as if she could vault into other people’s dreams and vault out again before daybreak.

The blue window darkens, dulls. Glancing at my watch, I see how very late I am. Boone will be furious. I don’t feel queasy anymore, but I do wonder if I am ready for tonight, if I am ever ready, if I have ever been ready. I wonder if I should stop, but then I remind myself that I did stop, for seven years, and it wasn’t better. In fact, it was much worse. This is my second chance. I won’t get a third. I head down the stairs, relishing the strong black licorice, following a dirt road overhung by trees toward the center of what remains of the future.

M
Y SISTER AND
I had matching felt coats. Our mother made them. They were like the coats of little hussars, with strong shoulders, nipped waists, and deep, elaborately embroidered cuffs. The full skirts of the coats tapped the backs of our knees. Lila’s coat was red—the red of tulips—and mine was blue—sky blue. Her long blond hair fanned out over that tulip red, wavy and luminous at her shoulders, then trailing away into ever smaller, fainter, wiggling golden threads, the same shade of gold as my father’s hair, disappearing halfway down her back. My hair, like my mother’s, was red and thick, pirate’s hair, which she cut short all over my head. In my coat I looked like a sky-blue stalk with an exploding red flower stuck on top: surreal, scrawled, perturbed. In her coat, my sister looked like one of the lost daughters of the Czar. The felt coats weren’t warm, but they were extravagant, which had its own sort of heat. We were living in the Wellfleet house then, it was winter, and we liked to roll down the dunes in our extravagant coats, whirling spirals of red and blue in the sand, sand in our mouths, sand in our hair, the coats’ skirts flying, dizzying ourselves. Lila was a fearless, tireless roller-down-of-dunes; she would stagger up again and again, dizzier each time, and hurl herself willy-nilly in any direction. “Run, Anna!” she’d yell at me over the beach’s ceaseless wind. “Run!” That was what we called it,
running the dunes,
like ski runs, maybe that’s what we were thinking. Though we had never skied, knew nothing about it except what we had glimpsed on the tiny, terrible black-and-white television that our father kept in an upstairs closet, taking it out and plugging it in perhaps once a week, to watch the news that we cared about not at all. When we pouted, he said, “You don’t need television, you have your amazing brains. Use them.”

A mixed blessing, that one. I sometimes think that Lila would like to forget about her brain, that she feels she has been superbly trained for some life she’ll never live, doesn’t want to live, but that fine brain of hers ticks on relentlessly, unstoppable. Where is the dune in Wyoming—where she and her husband have built an environmental wonder of a house, complete with composting toilet, and hand-raised two strong and sensitive boys—to turn that off, dizzy it into insensibility, or at least give it something impossible to work on?

Our father loved us, both our parents loved us, but there might be such a thing as too much visual pleasure. It leaves you with an appetite for something the world doesn’t necessarily have to offer—you know the door is there somewhere, it’s a perceptual plane, but it might open if you press on the air just here, if you tilt sideways to a particular degree and close one eye, if you go down that alley, if you follow that sound, if you sleep too much or don’t sleep at all, if you give up this lover or take on that one, if you spend all the money, if you hoard the money, if you make a sacrifice, if you wait, if you rush forward as blindly as possible, if you come to a full stop, dumbstruck. If you push harder. If you give up pushing. Our parents spent all their time visualizing things that didn’t, at the end of the day, exist. Tearing holes in the world. What were we supposed to think?

Two little girls in hussar’s coats, one tulip red, one sky blue, holding hands at the top of a dune. A Czarina and a pirate silhouetted against the sky, the empty beach their demesne, the wind rippling the full felt skirts of their splendid coats. My sister tugs me forward, and before I know it I’m already off my feet, whirling down a hill of sand.

I
F ALL ENERGY
and matter is made up of particles and waves, think of it as a wave. Something that leaves me and rolls to you, leaves you and rolls to me, over and over. You change, from you to you. I change. But the interior motion of the wave remains, moving between us. Everything matters. Everyone matters. Think of me, if you like, as a person who can’t ignore the wave. A radio that is always on. I’ve never slept enough, either, I don’t know, my parents weren’t big on organized bedtimes, maybe that has something to do with it. But, anyway. I’m not sure I can explain it any better than that. Maybe it’s also that, in bed, everyone reminds me of everyone else, some endless corridor of doors always opening and shutting, and me, like Alice in Wonderland, running from door to door, some tiny, some huge, looking for you, as you change from you to you.