“Take your clothes off,” she said, and while I struggled with the zipper of my jeans, she took a very realistic dildo out of a box beneath the futon, the dildo and the leather harness she fitted it into. I stopped fighting with the disagreeable zipper and the buttons on my shirt and watched, speechless, while she undressed, letting her clothes fall in a pile at her feet. Her nipples were erect and the color of walnut shells. Maybe I can’t remember what we talked about on the way from the club to her apartment, but I recall the exact shade of brown of Amanda’s nipples. They looked almost hard enough to slice me.
Maybe that’s all I ever actually wanted from her, for those walnut nipples to cut me open. Make me bleed. Maybe, Amanda, that’s the one thing you were never able to understand, because I was never able to articulate the desire.
She fastened the leather harness firmly about her small waist, the molded silicone phallus drooping obscenely between her thighs, and then she undressed me herself. I do not know how many times I came that night, or how many times she came. It seemed to go on forever, our lovemaking, the hammering of our sweaty bodies one against the other, even if there was no love there anywhere. Finally, towards dawn, I slept, and awoke hours later, hungover and disoriented, staring out that attic window at the sky above Grant Park. She was still sleeping there on the floor beside me, snoring very softly. And that was the night I met Amanda Tyrell. October 13th, 2006. Never mind if I don’t genuinely recollect even half the shit I’ve written down here, if I’ve just made stuff up to fill in the gaping mnemonic crevices. Whatever. A necessary fiction, and if the facts are compromised by my lousy memory, I don’t think the truth is any worse for it.
You want words, Dorothy? Well, you could have these. Maybe they’re not Shakespeare or Updike or Stephen goddamn King, but they are sincere and sincerely unexpected. Jesus fuck, how long’s it been since I’ve written this much at one sitting? I don’t even know. My wrist has stopped aching and is going numb. And there are pages and pages and pages. I didn’t notice the sun go down, and that was almost two hours ago.
Here you are, Amanda, like a wasp sealed in a hard, translucent nugget of Baltic amber, like a pearl, like a splinter wedged beneath a fingernail. Here you are, recorded for future demonologists to summon or puzzle over or merely fear. I need food. I need a goddamn drink.
CHAPTER TWO
Editor’s Note: A full twenty-six days elapsed between Sarah Crowe’s last entry in that part of the manuscript I’ve labeled “Chapter One” and the first entry in the section I’ve titled “Chapter Two.” Almost all that is known of her activities and experiences during this hiatus — almost a full month — is what she’s chosen to set down on paper. I have confirmed that some of this time was spent at the Tyler Free Library in Moosup Valley, and there were a few emails and phone calls to her agent in New York. Beyond that, we must rely on her account. It should be noted that it was not unusual for Sarah to put a manuscript aside for weeks at a time before returning to it, and, in that respect, the gap is not unexpected, however frustrating it might be to the reader approaching this work as a novel, rather than what can more accurately be described as a journal or diary.
A fucking hot day today. Only a fool thinks she’s escaping the heat of summer by coming to New England. There was rain last night, the first rain in days, but it only seems to have made matters worse. Everything outside the kitchen window is soaked in the scalding-white sun, and the humidity must be at least ninety percent. You live and learn, Miss Crowe, you live and fucking learn.
Two days ago, day before yesterday evening, while trying to escape the heat, I made my first trip down into the cellar of this house. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me to do so earlier. The cellar door is just off the kitchen, in a sort of alcove near the hallway that leads to the bedroom and bathroom. It’s an exceptionally small doorway, even by the standards of this place. What do you call the top of a doorframe? I know there’s a word for it. I measured it with a yardstick I found in the attic. Just an inch more than five feet, top to bottom, so I have to stoop a bit to keep from smacking my head. The ten steps down to the hard-packed dirt floor are narrow, and the cellar air is (no surprise) rank, as you’d imagine. Still, there’s no air-conditioning in this dump, and Blanchard won’t spring for window units. All I have are two useless box fans I bought in Foster, and, truthfully, it was a waste of good money, because they only manage to stir the hot air round and round. Sweat soup, I would call it. Anyway, I took a chair down there, one of the chairs from the kitchen table, and a flashlight and the book I’m reading. Fortunately, the cellar ceiling is not nearly so low as the doorway down to the cellar, though I’ve never been claustrophobic. I think that cellar would be a claustrophobic’s nightmare. There are shelves heaped and crammed and sagging with the weight with all manner of junk dating back fuck knows how far — decades, more than a century, I can’t yet say. And then there’s the stuff that’s just been piled directly on the floor. I parked my chair near the foot of the stairs and tried not to think about rats, spiders, and toxic mold spores. I’m guessing it was no more than sixty degrees down there, so it was heaven, really, after the broiling oven that this house becomes every afternoon, every night. I ignored the musty air, the stink like dirt and mushrooms and wet newspapers, though it was genuinely cloying.
Anyway, after only a couple of hours, I grew bored with the novel — it really isn’t very good, worse than one of mine — and started poking around in the refuse. I think maybe an antiques dealer or a historian would have a field day down there. Then again, there’s so much accumulated filth and mildew, deposited in thick, tacky gray strata, perhaps anything of significant value is beyond salvaging at this point. However, I did come across an old manual typewriter buried beneath a bath towel on one of the shelves. The thing weighs, I don’t know, I’m guessing twenty or twenty-five pounds, though it was marketed in the forties as a portable. I found one like it on a website devoted to the history of typewriters. It’s a 1941 Quiet Deluxe portable, manufactured by the Royal Typewriter Company of Hartford (later known as the Royal McBee Typewriter Company) just like Hemingway used at his home in Key West. “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,”For Whom the Bell Tolls,and Death in the Afternoon were all written on a Royal typewriter of this very same make and model. I saw one in mint condition online for $475, though the one from Blanchard’s cellar is, sadly, far from mint.
But it does type fairly well, the keys only sticking now and then. Conveniently, there was also a padded manila envelope stored with it, containing several inked silk ribbons that fit the machine. The envelope is lying here beside me. It was shipped from a company called Vintage American Typers from a P.O. box in Burke, Virginia, to a Dr. Charles L. Harvey at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Rhode Island’s Kingston campus. The Burke postmark is dated January 12, 2003. More than five years ago. There was even a single page still in the typewriter’s carriage, a sheet of onionskin paper, cockled finish and all. I don’t know if you can even still buy onionskin paper. It makes me think of the Oxford English Dictionary and Bibles and such. Anyway, the page reads as follows: