A Gentle Hell Read online

  I picked her up and she wrapped her hands around my neck. She buried her head in my chest. I carried her to the car parked at the end of the gravel road.

  “Where are you taking me?” she asked as I maneuvered her to open the car door

  “Somewhere safe,” I said.

  “Love you,” she whispered, and kissed my mouth. Closed her eyes. I tasted the caked blood. I put her in the back of the car, gently, so as not to hurt her. Without protest she lay across the backseat and grew still.

  “I’m going to get you some clothes,” I said. “Stay here, okay?”

  I closed the car door and went back into the house.

  I took a blanket from the top of the washing machine. After that, for the longest time I stood in the middle of the kitchen, trying to find something to grasp onto, trying to find a stray memory, a stray piece of fabric, to hold onto so I wouldn’t fall straight through the floor. I felt myself being pulled outside of my body and the sticky strands of my muscles roping my ghost.

  June called my name from outside.

  “I’m coming!” I said.

  On the way out, I grabbed the wrench.

  “Do you still love me?” she asked as we drove out of the gravel driveway, the blanket draped over her dead-weight ribs.

  “I never stopped,” I said.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “I told you, somewhere safe.”

  She turned her head and laughed, leaving a sticky trail of blood against the back seat in the shape of her. I drove faster, bit the inside of my mouth, and glanced at the wrench in the passenger’s seat.

  I didn’t know where I was going exactly - I passed the hospital in about twenty minutes and got onto the interstate. I kept driving. My hands turned into wrecks. June fell asleep in the back of the car and rolled over, clutching the blanket. And all the time, the wrench like a love crime on the passenger seat, obstructing my view from anything else, the same wrench once long ago cleaned of blood and matted dog hair and viral spit.

  I left the town and kept driving down the interstate. The sun rose over the flat horizon, a hot organ. I knew of a place that I’d been too long ago, once on a summer vacation before I’d ever met June or the monster inside of her, before I’d been confined to the three mile space between my work and her outstretched hand. So long since I’d thought of it. A woodland lake, surrounded by miles of trees and hush spaces. It’d be quiet. We’d be alone. Me, my wife, and the wrench.

  In the backseat, June coughed. In the rear-view mirror I saw her curl and uncurl her hands. Stiff, trembling hands, the fingernails caked with gore. She bit at her knuckles and whispered my name. For only a second, I saw the sixteen-year-old girl in the backseat, naked underneath the blanket with the white dress, bloody and mangled, tied around her wrists.

  At the next exit, I turned the car around and went back home.

  I drove back up our gravel driveway and shut off the engine. I sat in the driver’s seat for several minutes, shaking, looking at the wrench, looking back at June.

  “Where are we going?” June asked me.

  Without responding I got out of the car and opened up the back door. I gathered up June’s limp body in my arms. Once more she reached up and clasped her arms around my neck. Her head lolled across my chest, smearing blood.

  “There’s nowhere to go,” I said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  Though I didn’t see it, I felt it pressed against my skin. Her cold smile.

  The Singing Grass

  I told him that in the singing grass I saw a deer tear out the heart of a cougar, but instead of staying away he went out there to paint. He didn’t want to believe me about the deer, but he didn’t want to believe that I was a virgin either, so I let it go. It wouldn’t matter how many times I described the way I knelt at the edge of the singing grass, barefoot and tearing at my dress, eyes shaking like psychotropic leaves. And it wouldn’t matter how I described the raw mass of heart quivering on the ground at my feet, the deer on the other side of the meadow licking the blood off her muzzle with her black-tipped tongue. And all the while the grass, the blue aberrant grass, singing to lure me over the edge, press my face into its depths and drown me.

  Because I said to him once, when we first met, “all writers are liars,” like a badge of honor, and I’ve never managed to escape it since.

  So I stopped trying to stop him from going up there. Instead I watched him from my hiding place in the cover of the trees as he carried his painting supplies out of town to the side of the mountain, past the woods and the angry, gray-bottomed spring and then finally, the meadow on the edge of the singing grass.

  He didn’t paint landscapes outside on the edge of the singing grass, at least, not the kind of landscapes you see on bathroom walls and in the sterile, white-proofed halls of psychiatric wards. What he painted was alien and uncomfortable, anthropomorphic beings with exposed nerves and melting skin, balloons like vats filled with saline and brains. He painted clowns with holes for eyes and bodies made for flatworms, apocalyptic fog, empty skies that crackled like static.

  I’d never liked to watch people make art before, but I watched him paint because there was something alluring and impractically aesthetic about the way he moved, like an underwater machine. Even if I closed my eyes I’d still be able to feel his movement, the shadow of it, and all angles of him digging a hole into gravity.

  “I saw you watching me the other day,” he told me one night when we went back home. “You were watching me from the grass.” He slouched in a chair in the corner of the room underneath a portrait of his last ex-girlfriend, flowers spurting out of her decapitated head. He looked up at me with bug eyes that bit like teeth and he smiled.

  But the girl he saw in the grass wasn’t me.

  I remember as a child I went out to the singing grass with a notebook and I’d write what I saw like it mattered, poetry about love and other abstract concepts I had no real understanding of, journal entries about the friends I made up. I didn’t know what the singing grass meant back then, or what it contained, but it drew me to it anyways. I thought the blue grass looked like mammoth skin, and in the night when the full moon came out to the meadow I thought it was silently conversing with the dirt below.

  Out on the edge of the singing grass I learned the rules. When you’re a writer, you can only use words like serpentine and aberrant once in a lifetime. “So” and “very” are pointless modifiers. The road to hell is paved with adverbs. If you ask your friends to read your work, they’ll never tell the truth.

  And if you’re artistic and attractive and enigmatic, people will fall in love with you at the most inconvenient of times.

  Keep reading, that wasn’t the most important part. As a child out on the edge of the singing grass I met the girl that sprung from the earth, the girl with the sewed-on jaw and Morpheus eyes and thin line of drool running down her chin. Her clothes gleamed with moths tied into the fabric, still alive. Snake skins hung intertwined in her hair, and she clutched to her waist a formaldehyde jar full of black arms.

  “What are you working on there?” she asked when she saw me. Her voice was the voice of glass and mulch.

  I said nothing. My pen hovered over the page of my notebook. When I swallowed my throat felt like the blades of a meat grinder.

  “Can I read?” she said.

  I closed my notebook and shook my head. I didn’t mean to; it was nothing but a reflex. Even in the face of something alien I tried to hide my unfinished work. And I knew she was alien. No girl from the town could’ve snapped her head back until it touched the tip of her spine. No, she emerged out of the singing grass, out of the electric song that whipped through the meadow and straight through me.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “Can I show you something?”

  She set the formaldehyde jar down in front of her. The wind blew through the singing grass and it started to keen. The noise swept through the girl, into her snake hair and gleaming clothes, in and out with her
breath, pulsing to the rhythm of the moths beating her wings. She grasped the fabric of her dress in her fists.

  “One day we’re going to be good friends,” she said.

  Slowly, she started to lift up the hem of her dress. As she did so, the black arms in the formaldehyde jar stirred. The black fingers pressed against the inside of the glass jar and it tipped over on its side in the singing grass. The fingers kicked, the serrated ends of the arms braced themselves. The jar started to roll toward me.

  I ran.

  I didn’t come back to the singing grass until years later, after I’d met him, the artist, and realized that if I fell in love with him I’d go insane. We met in a coffee shop in town. He hadn’t slept for days and I could see it in his face, the purple-rimmed eyes, and the slack, paralyzed skin. He was holding an art show there. I wanted to impress him because his art somewhat intimidated me, but I couldn’t think of anything to say except, “did you know it takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy at the speed of light?”

  At least, that’s the romantic version. I don’t want to tell you the truth, because it would disappoint you.

  But picture this. One night he invited me out for drinks and I felt sociable, so I went. The next thing I know I’ve downed two Long Island’s, a beer, a shot of vodka with cranberry and I’m staring at his face, which I’ve never really seen before until now. Not just staring at it, but swimming in it. I noticed his eyes for the first time, bug eyes, always telling a story. His eyebrows that can’t stay still, the gaps between his teeth. That was the first time I’d found him attractive, not just in an aesthetic way, but in that intrinsic, warm-blooded sort of way.

  “Let’s go to the cemetery,” I told him. “I’m a necrophiliac. Let’s go.”

  And so we got in his car and drove away from the bar, down into the bottomed-out woods where the trees clamp down like bear traps. We parked beside the cemetery gate and when I got out I saw the silhouette of the mountain leaning over the cemetery.

  “Have you ever been up there?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, “pick a grave so we can start digging.”

  The next thing I knew I was up in a tree, the tree of life, with his head between my knees and my underwear in the pocket of his jacket. I grasped onto the limbs above my head, or at least, I tried to; they shook with the rain, slippery, like caught birds. I slipped. He caught me and brought me down into the dirt.

  “Where did you come from?” he asked me.

  “The tree,” I said. I started to take off his jacket, then his shirt. He started to do the same to me. That’s when I remembered I was a virgin.

  “Really? You’re joking,” he said.

  “I wish,” I said.

  “Are you saving it or something?” he asked.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t know. I’ve been busy.”

  “You’re lying,” he said. “Really?”

  “What’s with all the questions?”

  He took my throat in his hand and squeezed gently, not in a sexual way, more like in the way one holds a puppy by the neck to pick her up. When he kissed me I kept my eyes open. When he took the condom out of his pocket I clasped my knees together.

  “You’re tense,” he said. “Come here.”

  Because I remembered the girl I’d seen years ago in the singing grass on the side of the mountain. Now with the mountain looming over the graves, illuminating the graves, a hazy O-ring of fog splitting the distant meadow into shades of purple haze, I thought those memories might make me never sleep again.

  Forget this. I’m not good at describing things like this. I don’t understand why these mechanical motions have to mean anything, how the aesthetics of this particular setting could mean anything. We could’ve been picnicking on the moon, drinking strychnine tea in my grandmother’s bathtub, it wouldn’t have made a damn difference.

  He told me once that love was a temporary chemical imbalance. That love turns into hate. Not that any of that is profound, so instead of talking, let’s rewrite every love scene in every cheap paperback ever written, turn it into a chemistry lesson so we can watch the violent reactions underneath a sterile glass slide. It won’t be difficult to do.

  At the end of it all I lay in the dirt underneath the tree of life with my dress hiked up over my hips and condom thrown onto the ground. And still a virgin. I couldn’t help it, I started to laugh.

  “Why are you laughing?” he asked me.

  “No reason,” I said.

  He cocked his head, raised one eyebrow.

  “I lost my nerve,” he said.

  After that he drove me out of the cemetery and to my home in town. He hugged me like we were chaste, which, I suppose we still were. He took a cigarette out of his jacket pocket. Lit it.

  “I’ll see you later,” he said, voice scratched with smoke.

  I didn’t go home that night.

  Instead, when he drove me away I went back to the meadow, past the woods and the spring, to the edge of the singing grass that I hadn’t been to since I was a child. It was just as I remembered. The O-ring around the mountain dissipated, and the side of the sheer rock reached down toward the meadow like a drinking crane.

  Don’t ask me why I came back. The answer wouldn’t satisfy you. Just know that someone must’ve seen it coming, because the place had been prepared for me.

  On the edge of the singing grass sat an upholstered chair from my living room. And next to the chair, my floor lamp.

  If I didn’t know what I was doing as a writer I would say, “as if in a dream.” Because that’s what writers say when they don’t want to take the time to explain things in a logical way, or they’ve forgotten the reason why. But sometimes, in real life, there is no causal explanation for the actions that we take. And so, as if in a dream I crossed to the edge of the grass and I sat down in my chair.

  When I turned on the lamp, though there was no way it should’ve turned on, the deer grazing in the middle of the singing grass looked up at me. Her eyes gleamed in the light. Behind her I saw the shape of the cougar, almost amorphous, crouching in the grass.

  This time I didn’t look away from what was about to happen. Blame the intoxication, the particulars of the circumstance, the moonlight striking the grass just so like the bad mood lighting for a budget horror movie. I tensed in my chair and dug my nails into the arms until they bent, but I didn’t run.

  When the cougar pounced, the deer turned around and struck him. He hit the grass, stunned, and she bent down and ripped out his heart.

  The deer glanced up at me, saw me looking at her, and fled.

  I crawled through the grass as it keened. I knelt in front of the body of the cougar and watched its heart, still quivering, lit by my lamp that had somehow ended up on the side of a mountain. I tasted its pulse on the tip of my tongue.

  My hands shook as I reached out for the heart. It was warm and textured like a tongue, and as I cupped it in my palms it spit out the last of its convulsions and lay still. I brought the heart to my mouth and drew a deep breath. Its viscous, copper smell touched the back of my throat.

  I ate the heart.

  I think that’s when I realized this was never my story.

  One day out in the meadow he started to paint her. Even before her outline took shape on the canvas, I knew he was painting her. I could tell by the colors he mixed. That snake green. Moth brown. The sick gray of her skin. I watched from the trees, my usual hiding place. My chair and lamp had disappeared from the meadow long ago, to be replaced by the artist and his accouterments. The grass shifted its song when he worked here, no longer a keen but a hollow rustle. It drank him in and waited for the time when it could spit him back out.

  “What are you working on?” I asked him one night. I’d go over to his house most nights, climb through his open window and onto his bed. I told him at first it was so my boyfriend, who was one of his friends, wouldn’t catch me here. But we broke up soon enough and I still went through the same routine. In truth, I just liked climbing
through the window.

  Instead of responding, he asked me, “have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?”

  “What?” I asked him.

  “Do you know anything about quantum physics?” he asked me.

  “Yeah,” I said, “you put a cat in a box and it’s dead and alive at the same time.

  Schrödinger’s cat.”

  “Quantum entanglement. Two particles can have a relationship even when they’re separated by miles. Even time. Change the state of one particle, and the other one knows what’s happening.”

  “So you could use quantum entanglement to time travel?”

  “Sort of,” he said, “yes. But maybe not in the way that you know it.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  He lapsed into silence, outstretched one of his arms so that I could huddle close. He did that often; would go quiet if I asked about the underlying fundamentals of a thing, or would talk about something completely unrelated. That’s what happens when you forgetting you’re writing a story and you think you’re going to be profound. You ask questions trying to get to the center, like the answer will lead you to some ultimate revelation, the perfect Platonic form.

  If there was anything important I learned it was this: he taught me how to see a thing for what it is and not what I thought it represented. Not every atom has to be torn apart to get to its nucleus. Not every fact or idea has to be labeled and put in a schema. No, here is the earth that I’m gripping between my fingers. Here is the heart I’m chewing apart. Here is the rattlesnake tied to my wrist and the sharp pain that follows.

  Here is the tornado, god of entropy, tearing the house apart, and all I can think is that he looks sexy when he’s bent over a broken mirror snorting MDMA through a dollar bill. Everything else is extraneous.

  He painted her in profile, with the snakes in her hair writhing as if they were still alive. Her Morpheus eyes became empty slaughterhouses that caved inside her head and then collapsed. The moths sewn onto her dress turned into little children.

  It should’ve ended there, but of course it didn’t.