She shuffles once, pulls out the top card, shuffles again, pulls out another, then another. Seven of hearts, seven of spades, nine of spades.
“What does that mean?” I ask her.
But Tammy just bites her bottom lip and shakes her head.
Pea slams her hand on the table. Tammy freezes. “It doesn’t matter,” Pea says, and kisses me. As exact as I am sloppy, but we are equally desperate.
“It doesn’t matter,” she repeats. We fall together again. Silent, blessed, purged of conscious thought.
At some point we remember Tamara. I can’t tell if it’s my hand or Pea’s that reaches out when she gets up to leave. Pea’s words bob to the surface of my turbid thoughts: doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. Like my secrets and my dead. Like my lingering desire for my old lover.
Tamara, one hand on my shoulder, the other on Pea’s cheek. Pea’s crescent smile transformed to a real one. It doesn’t surprise me when Tamara kisses her first. Pea grips my hand. My knuckles twist and bunch. As if she trusts me to pull her from the rapids, but only if she holds on hard enough.
We change. No longer two and one, but three. My consciousness has crested past coherency. I am bright and dark and a series of shades in between. I am kissing Pea. I am kissing Tamara. I love. I want. I fuck. I’ve lost the direct object. My penis touches the back of Tamara’s throat. I push my tongue into Pea’s vagina and then withdraw it slowly. She tastes of lemons and grass and, faintly, of blood. It reminds me of—there’s a reason why—
Our desire’s shining fury. The thought dissolves. There is nothing more particular about the taste of her than the smell of her. The way Pea looks at me when I kiss along that corrugated ridge of skin.
She whispers something. Tamara smiles and pulls me down. We are both between her legs, tasting her and then one another. When she comes that first time, she kicks out hard against my hip. It might hurt. She speaks. The words separate into syllables. They dance nonsense in my head. I can see apology in her wet and dreamy eyes. I love. I want. I fuck. And here, the arm at the other end of mine. The weight on the opposing scale. The killing forces, perfectly arrayed: evil, justice, beauty.
Later, we subside. Substances unknowable flake white from our naked bodies. Tamara sleeps, curled against my side. In the hazy dawn, Pea gets a blanket. She places it gently over me and Tamara. Our eyes meet. The sentence completes.
“It doesn’t matter,” she whispers, and smiles—remote, indecipherable.
The curve of her spine as she leaves. The creak of the stairs as she climbs them alone.
12
That night, after more than twenty years of silence, a dream descends. My hands open like the lotus and let it in.
I dream of a river like the Hudson, but wider and deeper, trees looming on either side of its turbid expanse like rows of serrated teeth. I dream of a boat on that river, wooden, gleaming with fresh white paint. Sails the color of a sky before a storm. At the prow is an old wooden table, and on that table a body draped in white cloth. For my father, and in my childhood, white was the color of mourning, not black. But I don’t dream of who lies beneath that shroud. Lights appear one by one among the trees. Flickering lights like candles. Bigger ones like torches. Their bearers remain in shadow.
Phyllis speaks from somewhere along the shore: “I will kill him,” she says.
She wears white and there are three knives sheathed in her heart. She does not bleed. She holds the silver lighter I gave her years ago, with the rough circle I scored on one side. With this she sets fire to her dress. Though it burns, she merely shines in its light. Ashes bury her feet.
The river lights up the sky—or the sky flashes brightly enough to shine to the bottom of the river.
Now I can see clearly: it is filled with floating shapes. Not fish, as I first assume, but men. Hundreds and hundreds of men suspended in shallows and the deep like fish hiding from prey. They wear uniforms and they carry guns, but the bullets they fire float like eggs to the surface. They collect against the roots and grass and mud of the shore.
Alvin is there. He approaches from the woods to stand beside her. He rips one of the knives from her chest. “I will kill him,” he says. Phyllis kisses the top of his head.
Craver, wrinkled white skin wrapped around a heart of limestone, crawls from the bullets in the shallows and grasps at the burning hem of Phyllis’s dress. Phyllis takes a second knife from her chest and hands it to him.
“I will kill him,” the old man says.
I come to her then, naked and bleeding from my feet. I’m clutching a sheet of paper in my right hand: ORDER TO REPORT FOR INDUCTION.
I reach for Phyllis, but she turns away from me. She jumps into the river and swims through its illuminated depths until she reaches the boat. She climbs it, naked and shining. In the back of the boat, on the opposite side from the shrouded body, grows a garden. There are tea roses, pink and yellow, and watermelons starred like the night sky in a painting by Van Gogh.
Phyllis grabs the roses by their thorny stalks and rips them from their bed of warped wood. Her face contorts with pain, but she does not cry. Her hands tear with the force, but the wounds don’t bleed. By the shore, a woman screams her name—Tamara’s voice, though I never see her. Over and over, Phyllis rips the roses until only petals and
