The New Weird (18 page)

How, he didn't know, but he fell asleep, there in the chair, woke with his shirt collar sticking to his neck, sweat on his forehead and above his upper lip. He felt chilled. As he went into the kitchen to get something warm to drink his gaze went to the windows, it was irresistible, he had to look.

She was still there, slumped back against the fence, a curve in her arms and back that curiously suggested tension. She saw him; he knew it by the way her body moved, just a little, as his cautious figure came into view. He ducked away, then felt embarrassed somehow, as if he had been caught peeping in a window, then angry at himself and almost instantly at her.

Let her sit, he said to himself. We'll see who gets tired of this first.

It was almost ten days later that he called a doctor, a friend of his. Anne had not moved, he had barely gone near her, but even his cursory window inspections showed him things were changing, it was nothing he wanted to have to inspect. After much debate he called Richard, told him there was a medical situation at his house; his evasiveness puzzled Richard who said, "Look, if you have somebody sick there, you'd be better off getting her to a hospital. It is a her, isn't it?" Yes, he said. I just need you to come over here, he said, it's kind of a situation, you'll know what I mean when you see her.

Finally Richard arrived, and he directed him straight out to the backyard, stood watching from the window, drinking a glass of ice water. Richard was back in less than five minutes, his face red. He slammed the screen door hard behind him.

"I don't know what the hell's going on here," Richard said, "but I'll tell you one thing, that woman out there is in bad shape, I mean bad shape. She's got an infection that ― "

Well, he said, you're a doctor, right?

"I'm a gynecologist," and Richard was shouting now. "She belongs in a hospital. This is criminal, this is a criminal situation. That woman could die from this."

He drank a little of his ice water, a slow swallow, and Richard leaned forward and knocked the glass right out of his hand. "I said she could die from this, you asshole, and I'm also saying that if she does it's your fault."

"My fault? My fault, how can it be my fault when she's the one who ― " but Richard was already leaving, slamming back out the door, gone. The ice water lay in a glossy puddle on the chocolate-colored tile. He looked out the window. Her posture was unchanged.

It was a kind of dream, less nightmare than sensation of almost painful confusion, and he woke from it sweaty, scared a little, sat up to turn on the bedside lamp. It was almost three. He put on a pair of khaki jeans and walked barefoot into the backyard, the flashlight set on dim, a wavering oval of pale yellow light across the grass.

Perhaps she was asleep.

He leaned closer, not wanting to come too close but wanting to see, and flicked the light at her face.

Moths were walking across her forehead, pale as her skin, a luminous promenade. A small sound came from him as she opened her eyes. There was a moth beneath her right eyelid. It looked dead.

Her hair was braided into the fence, and the puffy circles of infection at her wrists had spread, a gentle bloat extending almost to her elbows. There was a slightly viscous shine to the original wounds. The old blood there had a rusty tinge. The grass seemed greener now, lapping at her bare feet and ankles. When he touched her with the light she seemed almost to feel it, for she turned her head, not away from the light as he expected but into it, as if it was warm and she was cold.

No doubt she was cold. If he touched her now -

He flicked the light to full power, a small brassy beam, played it up and down her body, nervously at first then with more confidence as she moved so little, so gently in its light. Her hair looked dark as a vine. There was dew on her clothing. He stood looking at her for it seemed to him a very long time, but when he returned to the house he saw it was barely quarter after three.

She kept on changing. The infection worsened and then apparently stabilized; at least it spread no farther. Her arms, a landscape of green and pale brown, leaves and the supple wood of the creeping growth about her breasts and waist, her clothing paler and more tattered, softly stained by the days of exposure. Flowers were starting to sprout behind her head, strange white flowers like some distorted stylized nimbus, Our Lady of the Back Forty. Her feet were a permanent green. It seemed her toenails were gone.

None of the neighbors would talk to him now. His attempts at explanations, bizarre even to his own ears, turned them colder still. Each day after work he would look through the kitchen windows, each day he would find some new change, minute perhaps but recognizable. It occurred to him that he was paying her more attention than ever now, and in a moment of higher anger he threw a tarp over her, big and blue and plastic, remnant of boating days. It smelled. He didn't care. She smelled too, didn't she? He covered her entirely, to the tips of her green toes, left her there. He was no more than twenty steps away when the rustling started, louder and louder, the whole tarp shaking as if by a growing wind; it was horrible to watch, horrible to listen to and angrier still he snatched it away, looked down at her closed eyes and the spi-derweb in her ear. As he stood there her mouth opened very slowly, it seemed she would speak. He looked closer and saw a large white flower growing in her mouth, its stem wound around her tongue which moved, feebly, as she tried to talk.

He slapped her, once, very hard. It was disgusting to look at her, he wanted to smother her with the tarp, but he was afraid to try it again. He couldn't bear that sound again, that terrible rustling sound like the rattling of cockroaches, God if there was only some way to kill her fast he would do it, he would do it right now.

The white flower wiggled. Another slowly unfurled like a time-lapse photo, bigger than the first. Its petals were a richer white, heavy like satin. It brushed against her lower lip, and her mouth hung slightly open to accommodate its weight; it looked like she was pouting, a parody of a pout.

He threw the tarp away. He pulled down the blinds in the kitchen and refused to check on her after work. He tried to think, again, what to do, lay in bed at night hoping something would somehow do it for him. After a particularly heavy rain, during which he sat up all night, almost chuckling in the stern sound of the downpour, he rushed out first thing in the morning to see how she'd liked her little bath. He found her feet had completely disappeared into the grass, her hair gone into vines with leaves the size of fists, her open mouth a garden. She was lush with growth. He felt a sick and bitter disappointment, with childish spite wrenched one of the flowers from her mouth and ground it into the grass where her feet had been. Even as he stood there the grass crept a discernible distance forward.

Grass, all of it growing too high around her. Well when the grass gets too high you cut it, right, that's what you do, you cut it and he was laughing a little, it was simple. A simple idea and he started up the mower, it took a few tries but he started it. A left turn from the garage, walking past the driveway with a happy stride, pushing the mower before him, growling sound of the mower a comfort in his ears and all at once the ground trembled, was it the mower's vibration? It trembled again, harder this time, no earthquakes here, what the hell and it happened again, more strongly, over and over until the grass moved like water, choppy undulating waves that gained and climbed until he stumbled beneath their force and lost his footing entirely, fell down and saw with a shout of fear that the mower was still on, was growling at him now, the waves of grass aiming it towards him. He rolled away, a clumsy scramble to stand again, half-crawled to the safety of the still driveway. As soon as his feet left the grass the waves stopped. The mower's automatic cut-off shut it down. He was crying and couldn't help it.

"What do you want," screaming at her, tears on his lips, "what do you
want,"
oh this is the last straw, this is enough. No more.

Back to the garage, looking for the weed killer, the Ortho stuff he'd used before, herbicide, and the term struck him and he laughed, a hard barking laugh. He had trouble attaching the sprayer, the screw wouldn't catch and he struggled with it, the hastily mixed solution, too strong, splashing on his skin, stinging where it splashed. Finally in his heat he threw the sprayer down, the hell with it, he would just pour it on her, pour it all over her.

Walking fast across the grass, before she could catch on, before she could start up, hurrying and the solution jiggling and bubbling in the bottle. "Are you thirsty?" too loudly, "are you thirsty, Anne, are you ― " and he threw it at her, bottle and all, as hard as he could. And stepped back, breathing dryly through his mouth, to watch.

At first nothing seemed to be happening; only her eyes, opening very wide, the eyes of someone surprised by great pain. Then on each spot where the solution had struck the foliage began not to wither but to blacken, not the color of death but an eerily sumptuous shade, and in one instant every flower in her mouth turned black, a fierce and luminous black and her eyes were black too, her lips, her hands black as slowly she separated herself from the fence, dragging half of it with her, rising to a shambling crouch and her tongue free and whipping like a snake as he turned, much too slowly, it was as if his disbelief impeded him, turning back to see in an instant's glance that black black tongue come crawling across the grass, and she behind it with a smile.

A Soft Voice Whispers Nothing

LONG BEFORE I SUSPECTED the existence of the town near the northern border, I believe that I was in some way already an inhabitant of that remote and desolate place. Any number of signs might be offered to support this claim, although some of them may seem somewhat removed from the issue. Not the least of them appeared during my childhood, those soft gray years when I was stricken with one sort or another of life-draining infirmity. It was at this early stage of development that I sealed my deep affinity with the winter season in all its phases and manifestations. Nothing seemed more natural to me than my impulse to follow the path of the snow-topped roof and the ice-crowned fence-post, considering that I, too, in my illness, exhibited the marks of an essentially hibernal state of being. Under the plump blankets of my bed I lay freezing and pale, my temples sweating with shiny sickles of fever. Through the frosted panes of my bedroom window I watched in awful devotion as dull winter days were succeeded by blinding winter nights. I remained ever awake to the possibility, as my young mind conceived it, of an "icy transcendence." I was therefore cautious, even in my frequent states of delirium, never to indulge in a vulgar sleep, except perhaps to dream my way deeper into that landscape where vanishing winds snatched me up into the void of an ultimate hibernation.

No one expected I would live very long, not even my attending physician, Dr. Zirk. A widower far along into middle age, the doctor seemed intensely dedicated to the well-being of the living anatomies under his care. Yet from my earliest acquaintance with him I sensed that he too had a secret affinity with the most remote and desolate locus of the winter spirit, and therefore was also allied with the town near the northern border. Every time he examined me at my bedside he betrayed himself as a fellow fanatic of a disconsolate creed, embodying so many of its stigmata and gestures. His wiry, white-streaked hair and beard were thinning, patchy remnants of a former luxuriance, much like the bare, frost-covered branches of the trees outside my window. His face was of a coarse complexion, rugged as frozen earth, while his eyes were overcast with the cloudy ether of a December afternoon. And his fingers felt so frigid as they palpated my neck or gently pulled at the underlids of my eyes.

One day, when I believe that he thought I was asleep, Dr. Zirk revealed the extent of his initiation into the barren mysteries of the winter world, even if he spoke only in the cryptic fragments of an overworked soul in extremis. In a voice as pure and cold as an arctic wind the doctor made reference to "undergoing certain ordeals," as well as speaking of what he called "grotesque discontinuities in the order of things." His trembling words also invoked an epistemology of "hope and horror," of exposing once and for all the true nature of this "great gray ritual of existence" and plunging headlong into an "enlightenment of inanity." It seemed that he was addressing me directly when in a soft gasp of desperation he said, "To make an end of it, little puppet, in your own way. To close the door in one swift motion and not by slow, fretful degrees. If only this doctor could show you the way of such cold deliverance." I felt my eyelashes flutter at the tone and import of these words, and Dr. Zirk immediately became silent. Just then my mother entered the room, allowing me a pretext to display an aroused consciousness. But I never betrayed the confidence or indiscretion the doctor had entrusted to me that day.

In any case, it was many years later that I first discovered the town near the northern border, and there I came to understand the source and significance of Dr. Zirk's mumblings on that nearly silent winter day. I noticed, as I arrived in the town, how close a resemblance it bore to the winterland of my childhood, even if the precise time of year was still slightly out of season. On that day, everything ― the streets of the town and the few people travelling upon them, the store windows and the meager merchandise they displayed, the weightless pieces of debris barely animated by a half-dead wind ― everything looked as if it had been drained entirely of all color, as if an enormous photographic flash had just gone off in the startled face of the town. And somehow beneath this pallid facade I intuited what I described to myself as the "all pervasive aura of a place that has offered itself as a haven for an interminable series of delirious events."

It was definitely a mood of delirium that appeared to rule the scene, causing all that I saw to shimmer vaguely in my sight, as if viewed through the gauzy glow of a sick room: a haziness that had no precise substance, distorting without in any way obscuring the objects behind or within it. There was an atmosphere of disorder and commotion that I sensed in the streets of the town, as if its delirious mood were only a soft prelude to great pandemonium. I heard the sound of something that I could not identify, an approaching racket that caused me to take refuge in a narrow passageway between a pair of high buildings. Nestled in this dark hiding place I watched the street and listened as that nameless clattering grew louder. It was a medley of clanging and creaking, of groaning and croaking, a dull jangle of something unknown as it groped its way through the town, a chaotic parade in honor of some special occasion of delirium.