Are you out of your fucking mind? asked Martin. He let go of the wheel so he could gesticulate wildly at her, and they ran headlong into a tree. She was thrown from the car, or else the car evaporated — she found herself seated on the cool ground watching the tree they’d hit. It was on fire. The hand-shaped leaves were lifted off by the flames and went spinning up into the sky. What is it? asked her brother. What is beautiful about him?
Rob Dickens was mumbling next to her ear when she woke. He was a sleep-talker. She had already spent a night or two listening closely to his rambling, thinking he might disclose to her some sort of fascinating personal secret, but what he said was only gibberish. He owned an emperor-sized bed, abducted, like the chandelier, out of Belgium. Why a Belgian should require such a large bed, she could not figure — she had had the idea since kindergarten that tiny people lived in tiny countries — unless it was for the reason she required that night, so that she could remove herself to a great distance and yet still be in bed with him. She slid to the very edge of the bed and watched him sleep. She strained her eye in the dark to follow the line of his body from his toe to his head, and then she sought to penetrate his face and his very mind with her gaze, all the while asking herself, what is not beautiful about him?
He opened his eyes as she watched him.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she said. He put his hand out to her, not reaching her despite the length of his arm.
“Come here.”
“No,” she said, and considered, not for the last time, how she was bad for him. “You will always know,” Sister Gertrude had told her class of trembling third-graders. “You will always know the wrong thing, and choose it freely.” Sister Gertrude was a million years away now; all that time had made her pathetic and small — she was just a nun-shaped nubbin on a chain of nun-nubbins hung in a chain around her dead brother’s neck. But Jemma really had always known the wrong thing, and chosen it, and so she chose it now. Angels should be singing, or devils shrieking, or the walls should shake. No, no no no! cried her ghosts, but she quieted them. What was true to her she put away for what was sensible. What was safe she put away for what would put him at risk. What was lonely, what would redeem her, what would have made her the saint of her own obsession, she put away for selfish need, or for love. She took his reaching hand.
With her mouth engaged she looked through his legs at the lightning in the window. It flashed through the water — falling so heavily against the glass that she was reminded of the time they’d made out in a car wash — and cast their shadow on the wall of the darkened room. She paused to catch her breath and turned her face to the wall, to see the curious silhouette, the way his neck and shoulders grew out from between her thighs, and how his legs, thrust out from her shoulders so they looked in shadow like her third and fourth arms, shuddered and waved. She turned her attention back to him, but still cast glances synchronous with the lightning so she could see how they made insects, trees, and Eastern deities on the wall, until they rolled off the bed and his mouth came inching up her body, to find her own mouth. Then she only saw his face, closer and closer. When the lightning flashed again she imagined it echoing in the globe of his eye.
Strange, certainly, that witnessing a delivery should make her need this, but stranger still that she should try to ruin the joy of it with dark thoughts. Always when they were together like this, especially when they were desperately and ferociously together like this, when she really ought not to have the capacity to consider anything but the immediacy of her overwhelming pleasure, still the greater portion of her thought, even as she and Rob clawed and pulled at one another, and stood, and lay down, and stood up, and squatted, and knelt, and stood again, was devoted to her brother, her parents, and her first lover. She had used to think that her ghosts presented themselves in her mind to warn her — again and again and again, every day and night of her life forever and forever — of the obvious: that everyone she loved must die. Then she wondered if they might not be spectators at fleshly events to which they could never again be party, and she found herself savoring the tastes and collisions and knotty tensions for their sake. And finally she knew it was because they were always with her that they were with her at this seemingly most inappropriate time, and it was only her own perverse will that called them out of memory to present themselves. But now she could get it over in a flash, the thought of them. As swiftly as if they were handing her off from each to each in a frenetic dance she passed among them — father, mother, lover, brother. She spent an instant at each funeral and saw her parents’ caskets, and she saw the box that hid her brother’s ashes, all that was left after the butchery he performed upon himself. And she saw her lover’s face, marred by the obscene reconstructions of the mortician. His eyes had been left open at his weird mother’s request. Jemma had been sure he’d winked at her as the casket was closed.
Rob pressed his forehead against hers, so hard she thought their heads must break into each other, and their brains would mix like yolks. “Come back,” he said.
It called to Jemma’s mind a spinning fun-house trick room, the way they rolled along the walls. It would not have surprised her too much to open her eyes and discover herself pinned against the ceiling by Rob’s handsome hips. They rolled against the door. After a little while, when she heard a new noise, she thought at first it was her foot fluttering against the wood, but it was somebody knocking. They grew still, and Jemma wondered if the door was locked. The knock came again, louder and more forceful. The door handle jiggled, and a voice called through the door. “Hello? Is anyone inside? I left my pencil case.” For what seemed like five whole minutes the person worked the handle. Is it so difficult to understand, Jemma wondered, when a door is locked? And then she wondered who carried pencil cases out of sixth grade, anyhow.
Rob arched his back and neck to look at her — he was myopic and not wearing his glasses. While the door handle rattled he lifted a hand and ran his finger down her forehead, over her nose, mouth, and chin, down her neck and chest and stomach until his finger was resting exactly in her belly button. Even after the person on the other side of the door finally gave up, Rob regarded her silently.
“What?” she whispered, and he brought his face so close to hers that the sweat rolling off her nose clung briefly to his before falling to strike her foot. “I love you,” he said. Oh no. You are over that, Jemma. There’s no harm in this, and no mischief, and O I will fill chapters in the Book of the King’s Daughter with all the evil things you and he could be doing now, and though God is even now raising His hand to strike the world, it is not to punish your pleasure, or because a good man loves you, or because you love him, or because you have angered your dead, or betrayed the dreadful imaginary empiricisms that support your depressing logic. Fine, swallow your words — that low, warbling groan contains the same number of syllables as I love you, and it’s close enough for Rob. Fine, spike your delight with dread, but don’t stop, please don’t stop now.
Fine orgasms recalled others. She was not a person who reflected all the next day on the pleasure, and wasted hours on the daydreamy wanting of it. But as she approached the finish with Rob Dickens, she thought of the time with her first lover when she had been sure she’d briefly felt all he felt, and had been disappointed at what he got, because it seemed so small, a spasm that satisfied for less than a second and left behind a terrible need. She thought of the time in college she’d stepped ever-so-carefully home after a night of drinking mushroom tea with her friend Vivian and a set of silly girls from her organic chemistry class. She’d spent the dawn hours with a banana and an imaginary creature she named the Monkey King. And what she thought was her first, when she was still in grade school, in a dream, when Jesus had floated down from Heaven to become a pure white glow beneath her sheets.