sky.)
Ah? But what can this be? Deep in the drawer she finds two little books coming unglued and held together with string. “You’ve found us!” they chirrup so shrilly she is startled. “High time! High time!” Raising their covers they fly directly into her hands. And the little dog prancing on his hind legs, he, too, cries out: “High Time! High Time!” It is hard to remove the string, her hands are shaking so.
The first book, the one on top, is familiar to her. It contains the name of the ship they sailed together on their brief honeymoon, the cities they visited, Pisa, Pompeii. the names of hotels, a list of gardens, museums — and she recalls all those distant places where it had seemed they had been madly in love, although. Everything written with his thick-nibbed pen and ink as black as tar. But now the second book shudders with such eagerness beneath the first she must attend to it at once. This book contains her husband’s dreams, and it thrusts and rages into her heart.
There are a number of dreams, any number of dreams, about E. E in the green dress is how the dream begins, E in the green dress laughing. E, the dress now pushed above her legs, above her ass and he, the dreamer, the one who is her husband, fucking E, fucking E’s cunt, E’s ass; E naked on a green couch in a green room — why is everything green? How can her own terrible jealousy color a dream about which she knew nothing? How can it be that this venomous air, this green air that she is forced to breathe because there is no other air, is the dream’s primary color?
In the dream E says, “I’ll fuck you till you weep.” But it is she, the one who is betrayed, who is weeping.
Outside the snow is falling. She has only one match left to light and so decides to save it. Nearly dead with cold, his dreams scramble into her mind like ferrets; they will not let her be.
He fucks a woman briefly encountered, a pale woman with hazel eyes flecked with gold. Yes. How fascinating women are — she can appreciate this — in all their variety. Flecked with gold, her white forehead as smooth as the egg of an ostrich. Her breasts, too, heavy and white. A woman she recognizes as someone she had once offered a perfect cup of tea, once upon a time in those days not long ago when she lived full of grace and wandered freely in rooms now impossible to reach. This woman she vividly recalls he fucks in a brothel within a maze or catacomb that extends beneath the Tower of Pisa or maybe it is Pompeii because there are ashes falling all around them. He chokes upon them. She chokes upon them.
Her husband’s dreams are all fucking dreams. He fucks his own sons: the one who is lame, the club-footed son, the halting son. Have I hurt you? he asks in the dream. Have I hurt you? he insists, dreaming. But his sons do not speak. Their place in the dream belongs to silence.
A year unfolds reduced to letters of the alphabet and the colors of things dreamed: black ashes, a white body, the green weather within a room. In the final entry he is fucked by someone terrifying; he has no idea who. Without color or letter she is a shadow as filthy as death, and collapses heavily upon him. A shroud? He wonders. Has he been fucking beneath the shadow of death all along? Could it be that simple?
The cold is too intense to bear and she is forced to light her last match. Its heat and clarity offer her a moment of hope at once snapped up and swallowed. Hugging her knees she falls into a dream of her own, a dream that like all her dreams these days comes to her like a malefic visitation from some lethal galaxy.
In her dream they are standing together by the side of a country road, one somehow familiar. A movie screen has been set up in a ditch and E, the E of the green dress, stands behind a projector showing a snuff film. The images smear the screen like a filthy water.
She wants to turn away, but he forces her to look, holding her wrists behind her back as when inexplicably his lovemaking had become cruel. Her head and eyes, too, are immobilized so that she cannot look away, will forever be forced to see what he could not help but see, all those things he saw night after night in those terrible dreams of his.
Outside in the winter streets people come and go on their way home with wheels of yellow cheese and fruit of all colors imported from distant places. She hears the sounds of the fruit vendors calling, and overwhelmed with longing imagines what it would be like to bite into a red fruit, freshly picked and brimming with juice.
It comes to her that if leprosy is rampant in the region, it is because the gods in their legions are unquenchable.
At the moment Kate Bernheimer asked me for a fairy tale, I was working on a piece that I realized only then was very much rooted in both “Bluebeard” and “The Little Match Girl,” who, in fact, often appear in one form or another in my work. (For example, Tubbs in The Jade Cabinet is Bluebeard, and in The Stain, Charlotte is the Little Match Girl.) When I was just entering into adolescence, a friend of my father’s dropped off a large box of old leather-bound fairy-tale books with thick yellow pages that had never been cut, a fabulous selection of tales from all over the known universe! After seriously damaging the first book, I learned how to cut the pages, and as my hands were stained red by the leather (the bindings were very fragile) devoured the entire collection again and again. I had always loved fairy tales, but these books were especially haunting for their beauty and their unbridled ferocity, even eroticism. (As I recall, Ondine was especially sparked with heat, and Bluebeard with bloody ice.) It could be that “Green Air,” the story here, is one attempt among many to shake off the ghosts of those marvelous books, some of them nefarious! Not many years later, my mother gave the books away without my knowledge, and I continue to search for them.
TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT. The Mermaid in the Tree
DESIREE, THE CHILD BRIDE, AND HER SISTER MIRANDA HAD GONE grave robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.
“Can you believe we’re the only ones to have ever thought of this?” Miranda said, her knuckles bloodied from shoveling dirt, as she undid the delicate whalebone buttons lining the back of the skeleton’s dress.
Desiree, however, was less inclined to be enthused, and she climbed from the hole, distracted, to light a cigarette on the flame of the lantern. She uncorked a jug, gulped down a few fingers of whiskey, and squinted at the horizon of plains burned black by old prairie fires, the setting sun leaving behind a thin ribbon of violet. His heart isn’t mine, she thought.
The two sisters snuck back to Rothgutt’s Asylum for Misspent Youth, where the girls had lived since infancy, having been arrested then for taking candy from a baby. Desiree was fifteen now, Miranda fourteen, and Desiree’s impending wedding, to take place at midnight in the all-night chapel of a seaside amusement park, excited Miranda far more than it did Desiree. The engagement burdened Desiree terrifically. As Miranda cinched Desiree into the corpse’s stiff flounces of taffeta, then teased her straw-like hair into a glam fright-wig of poof and aerosol lift, Desiree plotted out how she might best jilt her betrothed.
“It needs a heavier blast of spritz,” Miranda said, leaning back with one eye closed, surveying Desiree’s hairdo. “Cover your face with this pillow.”
As she did so, and as Miranda gave her hair a heavy fogging with the DDT pump she’d filled with her own mixture of liquor and sap, Desiree could hear, in the muffling from the pillow, the thick rise and fall of the ocean, and she knew this was the mermaid ghost beckoning her to the tree. The mermaid ghost had something important to tell her.
Desiree stood and tossed the pillow aside, and lifted the bottom of her dress just above her bare feet so she could run from the room. “Flowers,” she told Miranda, and she hurried through the halls and into the walled-in
