The Elementals (11 page)

The fire had been lit and the warmth hit me hard as I walked inside. The coat itched my skin.

“May I please have my dress?” I asked. Tania’s eyebrows went up. “
Your
dress?”

She laughed but handed it to me and I slipped it on. “There you go. That wasn’t so bad, was it? You passed the test, Sylph.” I was sweating but they didn’t seem to mind the heat themselves.

We went into the parlor, where John lay on the ground with his long legs spread out in front of him, firelight making the watery fabric of his green shirt gleam. Tania and Perry sat on the couch. It was hard to imagine that they had been staring at my naked body a short time earlier.

I sat a bit farther off. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do now. The fire crackled in the grate but no one spoke.

“Remember when you told me about your thesis?” I asked John.

He turned his head and there was a brightness in his eyes, probably from the firelight, that I wanted to imagine had to do with me. “Yes.”

“You believe in the continuation of the soul?”

“I believe the daimon goes on in some form. In a form we recognize if that’s the way we perceive the world.”

“The daimon?”

John flipped onto his stomach so his face was closer to mine. “Daimons are the spirits in things.”

“Is it like demon?”

“Demons are considered evil. Daimons don’t have to be. Daimons are everywhere, every rock and tree and body of water, everything. Every culture has some form of them. But people stopped believing in them so they had to find different ways to be recognized.”

“If you deny them they will reappear in your head.”

“Exactly.”

“There’s a homeless man on the street. And the first time I passed him he said that. I thought he meant demon.”

“They appear in psychology, in dreams, anywhere they can be accepted. They don’t just come for their own purposes. Without them people are nothing, zombies. Daimons are souls and I don’t think they ever just vanish into some void.”

“Because my friend…” I began.

Tania reached out for me. “Come here,” she said. “Come, baby, come closer to the fire.”

“I’m too hot.”

“Come closer.”

I found myself moving toward them. The heat was so intense, especially after the cold of the garden. My head was a-throb and it was hard to breathe. Moisture trickled into my eyes like tears.

“It’s purifying,” Tania said. “It will help you understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Who we are. Who you are.”

“Who are you?” But maybe I didn’t want to understand. Suddenly a black shade of anxiety was dropping down over my mind. I needed air. I was gasping for it.

“Are you okay?” John asked. He got up and came to sit beside me, handed me a glass of water and I took a small sip. He brushed some hair from my cheek. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I feel a little light-headed.”

John turned to Tania and Perry. “I’ll take her home,” he said.

Just like the last time he put me in the finned car with the torn upholstery and drove me to the dorms. We didn’t talk the whole way; I was too exhausted from the night. I sat breathing that warm, heady flower-smoke scent that seemed to follow them everywhere and staring at a crystal pendant that looked like a piece from a chandelier hanging from the rearview mirror. I wondered if it might hypnotize me if I stared at it long enough.

“We’re going away for a little while,” John said. “To visit some friends. Can I see you when we get back?”

I nodded, still staring at the piece of crystal. I wanted to ask if I had passed the test, if I was an initiate into their world now, but if he was saying he wanted to see me when they returned, I assumed I was. The question really was, how long could I stand to be away from them?

When we got to the dorm, John walked me to the door of the lobby and opened it for me but he didn’t come inside.

13. Nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet

I went to classics Monday morning and sat in the back of the huge lecture hall as Professor Gordon, a small man with a neat, pointed beard, told us about the origin of tragedy.

“
Tragos,
” he said, in a gruff voice, “which means goat dance. The first tragedies were enactments, songs and dances to praise the god Dionysus. Now we are not only robbed of our rituals. Even the gods and goddesses we have left—the actors and actresses we worship in films whom we can identify with all the traits of the traditional deities—are forced to enact mostly comedy, works with no tragic element or with potentially tragic elements that are resolved in Hollywood’s so-called happy endings. Without the performance to contain it, the tragic seeps into our daily lives with acts of real violence.”

And as I sat there, looking down the steep sides of the dark auditorium to the small circle of light where the goat-like professor stood, I thought of Jeni again. And I thought of John’s question about the soul. Had Jeni vanished because someone had lost their soul? Could someone who killed children have a soul? Did Jeni’s soul continue on? In what form? I put my burning forehead down on the cool wood of the desk, wondering if I could set it on fire this way, and tried to stop the questions from forming again and again in my brain.

*   *   *

I was sitting on the steps by myself, forcing myself to eat some lunch, when Melinda Story walked by. Stopped.

“Hi, Ariel. How’s it going?”

“Fine,” I said. “You?”

“I wondered how you like Professor French’s class,” Melinda said. She was scrutinizing my face.

“Well, I only had one so far but it seems great. Thank you for recommending me.”

I was shielding my eyes from the sun to look at her so she sat down next to me in the shade.

“May I ask you a personal question?”

I knew what she was going to ask and I didn’t want her to.

“I’m concerned. Are you getting some support?”

“Oh, I’m really fine,” I said as brightly as I could. “I got all As last semester and I like my classes.”

“I just want to make sure you’re not pushing yourself too much. I did the same thing my first year and I had to drop out. I almost never made it back.”

“No, really, everything’s okay,” I told her.

“Do you have friends to talk to?” There were worry lines in her brow. She was so sweet. Why did I want her to leave?

“Oh, I have friends, yeah. They’re great. They’ve been really supportive.”

“Good, that’s what I want to hear.” Melinda patted my shoulder. “But if you need another friend, you’re welcome to come have dinner with me sometime.”

*   *   *

I hadn’t lied to her, really. I’d gotten straight As and I did like my classes so far. And I had friends. Well, not really friends, but people. I had shared two meals with them, worn their clothes; we had laughed and talked and danced and touched. I just wasn’t sure why they had let me into their lives and if I would be allowed to stay. I wasn’t sure if they would even call me again when they returned from wherever they had gone.

Eleanor French was a slim woman in her forties who wore beautiful silk blouses, tailored tweed skirts and designer heels. She rhapsodized about the modernist poets in a smoky voice and it made me feel drunk when I listened to her. She started with Yeats, reading aloud from
The Celtic Twilight
about the Sidhe:

“‘Love with them never grows weary, nor can the circles of the stars tire out their dancing feet.’”

“What did these beings symbolize for Yeats?” she asked. “What was his fascination at a time when God was being questioned?”

I had wondered about the Sidhe before; my parents were always reading me folk and fairy tales when I was little. But somehow rediscovering them in this book, which seemed, especially when read by Professor French, to be written as factual evidence of mystical experience, startled me, even more so in the state I found myself.

I thought again of the defining characteristics of the schizoid personality, of Tania’s long arms as she waved them above her head like wisps of smoke, of the roses tattooed on her shoulders and the strangeness of her voice, of Perry’s puckish features and green polished nails and of John, always of John—the glister of his eyes, the black, black hair and the thoughts you could almost see spinning in his head, thoughts I wanted to see and understand.

The Sidhe were tall and thin and beautiful with silvery voices and strange, capricious ways. They dealt in magic, in dance and poetry, and also in punishments for misdoings and in the business of stealing souls. I didn’t fully know yet why Yeats was fascinated with them but I knew why I was. My own personal Sidhe were gone and I longed for Perry, Tania and John as if they had taken away with them my soul.

*   *   *

Maybe I’d spoken too soon about liking all my classes because by the second week it was clear that my creative writing workshop teacher, Hamilton Portman, had chosen his favorites, and wasn’t going to make things easy for the ones he was less impressed with. I was one of the latter.

Out the tall, thin windows of the English building I watched the sun play on the leaves, turning them brighter green. Portman was discussing the writing of a blonde girl named Jessica Steinholtz. He couldn’t seem to contain his enthusiasm; he was practically salivating.

“This is exactly what I’m looking for,” he exclaimed. “The restraint, the visual imagery, the rhythmic quality of the language.”

Jessica Steinholtz was trying to control a smile that kept threatening to break out on her face. It wasn’t her fault that the professor wanted to fuck her, I thought. She was beautiful and her writing was good enough. But it all made me uncomfortable.

We went around in a circle discussing Jessica’s piece, which was about a young man obsessed with his sister’s beautiful best friend. There was something weird about Jessica’s descriptions of the gorgeous blonde, obviously based on herself. I kept thinking she would have been wise to at least change the girl’s hair color, since the endless praising of the flaxen locks got a little embarrassing. The boys in the class were almost as enthusiastic as the professor and the girls mumbled praise, afraid to appear disagreeable.

When it was my turn I said, “It’s really clean but I’m not convinced about the voice. It seems very feminine. I’m not sure a guy would describe her that way. ‘The Jimmy Choo stilettos,’ ‘the perfectly applied shade of her lip gloss.’ They seem a little forced, maybe? Plus, the girl’s young. Would she have designer shoes like that?”

Professor Portman glared at me across the table. I could feel sweat trickle down the sides of my rib cage and tried to remember if I’d put on deodorant that morning. I was distracted all the time.

“And you are an expert on how young men describe women?” he asked me. There was a slight smirk on his mouth and I suddenly understood the expression about wanting to wipe a look off someone’s face, and not gently.

“Not always, no. But it just sounds awkward compared to other places in the story that work.”

“And what about designer shoes? It’s true, as a very masculine man”—he winked—“I’m not aware if young women wear Jimmy Choos or not. Jessica?”

She grinned and held out her tanned leg, on the end of which a delicate foot dangled a black high-heeled pump.

The class laughed and I hung my head and stared at my silver Converse from Target. I should have known; how stupid.

“Okay.” I could swear the teacher rolled his eyes. “Moving on.” He shuffled his papers and pulled mine out. “Ariel?”

I felt the panic rise. I wanted to get out of there, clenched my thighs together, trying to relieve the pressure building between them.

My piece was about Halloween at the house. I wondered why I had submitted it. It suddenly felt as if I was standing naked before the class, blood pouring down my legs. This was private and I shouldn’t have exposed it here. Also, it made me miss them more.

Professor Portman made me read a short section in my shaking voice. Then he dug in.

“Firstly, I’m wondering if this is fiction at all. There seems to be no distance between the writer and the narrator. The amount of adjectives clutter the piece and make it hard to extrapolate imagery from it. Sometimes the more you describe something, the more obscure it becomes. Show us, don’t tell us what you see. For example, the Jimmy Choo shoe in Jessica’s piece is more evocative than all these detailed descriptions of the house. Also, what exactly is happening here?” He snapped the page he held with his thumb and first finger. “You mention the dead girl on the flyer but then just kind of drop it.”

It wasn’t just me that stood naked and bleeding before everyone; it was Jeni. “The dead girl.”
I’m sorry,
I told her.

The students critiqued my piece, mimicking pretty much everything Portman had said. By the time they were done I had sweat stains under my armpits. As we walked out, Kyle Langley, a tall guy in a pink Lacoste shirt and glasses, leaned over me and whispered, “You smell
great,
Ariel! Is that your natural
odor
?”

I
hadn’t
remembered my deodorant and the smell coming from my body was the toxin fear.

*   *   *

But I couldn’t write my classes off; I needed to do well. It was something I could control, unlike my mother’s health, Jeni, John, Tania or Perry. And Tania had told me not to let anything slide, as if she were warning me that I had to get good grades. It had always been easy to do this in high school and I couldn’t stop now when so much more was at stake. Maybe what I believed to be my only shot at joy was at stake. Maybe my only chance to see John again.

So I continued to study, I continued to run. I spoke to my parents regularly but I didn’t tell them much; I didn’t want to be disappointed by their vague, distracted response.

The closest I got to another world was People’s Park where the homeless gathered. Sometimes I’d stand at the periphery at night, peering through the trees at the small area of grass, looking for something I couldn’t define. A few shadowy shapes moved there, and I wished for John’s arms around my chilled shoulders.