I looked away from her face and thought I should have listened to her when she suggested I keep writing about the squirrel, and later, when she tried to steer me away from the hard-nosed business world I had mistakenly chosen for myself. Had I not felt toward her an early animosity, a belief that she had been disloyal to me, had committed a perfidy by being a writer herself, and a famed one at that, I might not have refuted and refused. Sitting on my bed, I was sure right then I did not blame her for the dissatisfaction I felt with my life, with the fact that my future was a complete unknown.
I pulled up the blinds, expecting to see a late Indian-summer sky, like the one the day before, but something had changed overnight. The sky was the color of cement, of decay, of the bars of prison cells, and high-speed weather was massing rapidly right outside of my window.
It had remained warm into October, but now I noticed that the gardens in front of the quaint town houses and the refurbished row houses across the street had lost their pep, and the trees that bordered the sidewalk were fraying, their tight leafy summer canopies eaten away. A plinking of light rain all at once, and I interpreted in those slanted drops a harbinger. Rationally, I knew Ashby could not control the natural world, but still I wondered if the escalating weather would end up on her side.
I walked out into the huge main room of my apartment, into my open kitchen, started the coffee, then stood at my wall of windows. Fifty tessellated panes giving onto a view of distant spires and near rooftops, always a monumental draw for me, a way to calm or incite.
The light plinking rain converted into a steady drizzle. Water droplets were dancing on the windshields of the parked cars wedged in, puddling on the sidewalk and road.
I watched a plump girl slowly jog by down below, brushing water from her face. Even three stories up, I could see her ass cheeks crashing beneath her pink sweatpants, as if she had Columbus’s ships lashed together in there, and I saw the ship of my own life cruelly buffeted by a storming sea. At the corner, she slowed, tugged her underwear free from her crack, then sped back up. She was trying to better herself, and what was I doing? It was a short drop to the pavement, but if a person flung himself just right, the fall could inflict rupturing damage, broken bones, a smashed skull.
I turned away, filled my cup with hot coffee, and returned to my bed, to resume the weighty obligation to myself that I did not want to be fulfilling.
“Killing Close Friends” was a locomotive on tracks with switchbacks I had not anticipated.
“What are you going to do with that knife, Evan? Kill me? Oh, come on, put it down. You were never going to turn the experiences of your life into stories. You said, ‘It would be too hard to put all that pain down on paper,’ so why let that pain go to waste, if someone else can gain from it. It’s the way of the world, the weak and the strong, those who are battered down, those who do the battering. I’m sorry, but I didn’t make things as they are.”
The knife was heavy in Evan’s hand, its jagged teeth gleaming under the kitchen light. She could imagine herself sinking it deep into Karen’s belly, one thrust in, then tearing straight up, through her lungs, her heart, into her throat, silencing her forever. She wanted to see Karen’s bright eyes dead, rolled back in her head, limbs twitching, then nothing at all. She wouldn’t get away with it, she knew that, the trod-upon never do rise up, the meek never do inherit the Earth. But at least she would have removed one of the monsters roaming the world making it unsafe for the rest.
Evan raised her arm, saw herself as a character in a low-budget horror flick, then put the knife down on the counter and turned away. She could not look at Karen, did not want to see her face anymore. She would tell Karen what she thought of her, then pack up and move out. Someone from workshop would give her their couch for a night or two.
“Good girl,” Karen said, and Evan ignored her, pressed her hand onto the French bread, felt the crust snap sharply.
“I can’t believe—” Evan began to say, and then it didn’t matter. She looked down at her side, at the blade that was through her sweater, her T-shirt, deep inside her flesh, at Karen’s hand on the hilt, at Karen’s arm, taut with strength, holding the knife steady, pushing in and in and in, at Karen’s eyes, so close to Evan’s own face, the thrill she saw in them, pupils all dilated, her nose quivering with excitement, her mouth moving, saying words, saying, “Just give in. There’s no coming back from this. It will be better wherever you’re going,” and then Karen jacked the knife upwards and Evan shut her eyes, thought of her name, wondered for a split second if she would finally end up a young warrior in that other world, felt her legs give way, then she was gone.
I thought: She is a ruthless motherfucker, unsure whether I was referring to Karen Sweet, or to Ashby. It took me a long time to release my trapped breath while I tried thinking about nothing at all. An empty mind, I decided, was not always a terrible thing.
Then I began “Nina Disappeared.”
John met Nina in the Literary Fiction section of their neighborhood bookstore. He saw her neck first, slim as a reed, her head lowered over a book, her hair a golden waterfall. When she straightened and turned, her face dislocated his heart. Pale as an ivory cameo.
He thought of rosebuds when he took her mouth. She had sharp nipples that pricked. Decorative ears that heard words he did not say. She owned an impossibly tiny cunt in which he plunged to glory.
Before she entered his life, John had skated with women along the cool lake of misperception. He had believed that falling in love was meant for literal translation—an ecstatic high dive into despair, destruction, dissolution. Nina made him realize he had been all wrong; he felt now that love was a chord that retained a steady hum, not a cliff from which he needed to jump, a crash that left him, always, with bloody wounds. When they were naked in bed, John contemplated the unknowable cosmos, puzzles with missing pieces, trees that stayed evergreen, all of it reviving his belief in true and everlasting love. He said to her, “Move in with me,” and she did.
During the first days of summer, before the heat blanched life down to white bone, Nina was swinging in the hammock John had strung up for her. Looking into the distance, she said, “You know, that forest makes me think of desiccated breadcrumbs and witches with surly red eyes.” He looked, saw only old ash trees and shade, but nodded anyway.
When she said, “By fall, either we’ll marry, which would be good for you, or I’ll be dead, which would be bad for me,” she didn’t blink at all.
John was used to Nina’s declamations, the charming way she spoke in either/or and true-or-false constructions, but he could see, in the way she draped a hand around her throat, that the idea she might be dead by the fall surprised her as much as it did him.
When the trees whispered, leaves a bonfire brew, the air still humid and enveloping, one of those two things was, indeed, true.