The book of love, p.2
The Book of Love, page 2
A guitar pick sails out from under Laura’s bed and up into the jadeite mug, pinging off the cracked lip. The Harmony leans against the wall again. But the handle of the mug is still broken.
The Book of Laura
There were three. Where were they? Someplace they shouldn’t be. They couldn’t get out. When they found a way out, someone else followed them. Something came along with them.
Something happened. Something had happened to them. What? Something that shouldn’t have happened. Had they died? Were they dead? Surely they were not dead. But if they were dead, then what was this place? You couldn’t get out. This terrible place. Sometimes together and sometimes apart. There was no comfort in being together, but it was worse to be separated. Sometimes each of them was alone and that was worst of all. And now? Where there had been three, no question about that, now there were four.
They had been in an awful place. A blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness—how to describe it? Later on, one of them said, “I think I remember a lot of trees. There was a dirty path. And a clearing with someone in it.” Someone else said the only way to describe it was that it was like being an ant that had fallen into an Icee machine with only one flavor selection: expired-milk insomniac pushing dirty bad-luck needles through the hangnail skin of an endless, resentful night. Which was poetic, sure, and maybe not inaccurate, but it didn’t give you the whole picture. Really, you had to have been there.
* * *
—
They had been imprisoned. Then there had been a seeping warmth, a kind of shiver as if someone you’d once known how to be had walked past a door, and though that door was closed, they had pressed against it until there was the very thinnest seam—Such small stitches, whose hand had made them? Who had hung the hinges on this door?—but they were very thin now, too, and slipped through that loose stitch, one by one by one. And one more. Who?
* * *
—
There were four of them now. That was the first mystery.
The second mystery was where they found themselves. They had been in that other place. And then they dragged themselves out and found themselves in Mr. Anabin’s music room at Lewis Latimer Public School. They knew it was his room because there was Mr. Anabin’s baby grand. There was the poster of Hildegard of Bingen on the wall in front of them. De La Soul on the wall behind them. (Four is the magic number.) Dark outside the windows, and Mr. Anabin himself, playing a minor scale on the baby grand.
When he saw them, Mr. Anabin closed the piano lid and rested his hands in his lap. “So,” he said. The sound of a human voice in a human space was terrible and unfamiliar. “I thought it might be something like this.”
None of the four moved from where they were. Muddled together, they occupied less space than one or two would have in their proper state. The cracked linoleum floor was visible to them through the drifty suggestion of their own limbs.
Mr. Anabin approached slowly, as if, should he startle them, they might go flying through a keyhole, a window, the pockmarked ceiling tiles. He stood looking for a long time, and then he said, “Laura. Laura Hand.”
He made a little movement with two fingers. And here was Laura Hand (up until a year ago, quite sure of her place in the world) manifested, bewildered, and altogether both less and more herself than she had been for a long time. Her companions eddied around her like conturbations of dust.
“Mohammed Gorch.” Mr. Anabin flicked his fingers again. And there was Mo Gorch, who was a grade below Laura and Daniel but nevertheless in Laura’s third-period calculus class and fifth-period A.P. history. He was a friend of Susannah’s.
“And Daniel Knowe. Of course.” His fingers delineating a shape. Here was Daniel, who was dear to Laura. He and she and Susannah had a band, My Two Hands Both Knowe You.
Laura pinched her own arm. She was herself again: the sturdy architecture of her ribs, pulpy heart with its four chambers and the doors that open and shut, open and shut, the hasty blood rushing through, a red mark appearing where she had pinched. And yet something was still missing.
Wasn’t she?
“Where’s Susannah?” Laura said, looking around for her sister. “Susannah! What did you do?”
It was always Susannah who had done whatever it was. Wasn’t it?
But Susannah wasn’t here.
Laura’s entire skin felt wrong. She felt squashed and stretched somehow, like a piece of Play-Doh in a warm hand, and she felt like the hand, too. She thought, Well, I am a Hand. And then, Perhaps I have been given an experimental drug.
“I’m going to sit down,” Mo said. “Just for a minute.” Instead of sitting down on one of the chairs, he sat down on the floor and put his head in his hands.
Daniel said, “Someone lost a pencil.”
He reached up and pulled a pencil out that had been stuck in a ceiling tile. (For how long? Who knew?) That was how tall Daniel was. The pencil was very short. Someone had chewed on it.
Laura reached out and took it from him. She dropped it on the floor. “Don’t touch that,” she said. “No one wants it back.”
“Something very strange has been happening,” Mo said.
“Yeah,” Laura said. “But it’s okay now. Isn’t it?” Mo looked up at her. She held out her hand, and he took it in his own, startlingly warm and solid. She pulled him up onto his feet. Once, in calculus, he’d loaned her a piece of graph paper.
Having established they were all together and in the world again, at last they looked at Mr. Anabin. After all, it was his music room.
* * *
—
Mr. Anabin was a middle-aged-ish, brown-ish man. Tall-ish. Terrible posture. His wiry hair was short, and there was just a little gray in it. His hands were elegant, expressive. Manicured nails. Fingers long but not too long. They were, without question, the hands of a music teacher. The previous year, the PTA had raised enough money for the school to offer chorus and band as electives. Hence, Mr. Anabin. He played piano during school concerts. Chose and directed the school musical. Ran detention occasionally. He didn’t seem anxious to be anyone’s favorite teacher, but neither was he one of the bad ones. He wore blue jeans and T-shirts with affirmational statements on them. There was something in his eyes that, taken in concert with the T-shirts, made students feel vaguely uneasy. It was a certain look. Was it sardonic? Or only a little knowing? After a while, you didn’t look into his eyes. But then, as far as anyone knew, Mr. Anabin lived alone. Once, Susannah had said to Laura that sometimes during band practice, she found herself imagining Mr. Anabin’s laundry, Mr. Anabin sorting his whites from his colors. After all, no one else was going to do it for him. Folding his shirts: be your own kind of beauty. we can accomplish miracles if we believe we can. today is going to be the most amazing day and tomorrow will be even better. when life gives you lemons say thank you. lemons are delicious and refreshing. It was pretty fucking depressing, Susannah said, when you thought about it, which Laura didn’t understand. Laundry was just laundry. There wasn’t anything there to be depressed about.
Mr. Anabin’s gaze seemed fixed on something just past Mo’s shoulder. Laura, looking where he looked, could not see anyone standing there. And yet she felt sure someone was there.
Nonetheless she said, “Everything’s fine. It’s all going to be fine.”
“Why are we wearing these clothes?” Daniel said.
“They’re from Bye Bye Birdie,” Mo said. He sounded astonished to know anything at all. Laura hadn’t ever really hung out with Mo, although of course she was aware of him: his grandmother was Caitlynn Hightower. Laura had all of her books. Other things Laura knew: Mo was gay. His mother was dead. “From last year. I’m Albert. I’m wearing Albert’s clothes. I know that because I was Wardrobe. What’s with the bare feet? Is that weird? That we don’t have shoes or socks on?”
“I wasn’t in Bye Bye Birdie,” Daniel said. “Because of football practice. I don’t know why I’m barefoot. I have no idea what’s going on right now.”
“Looks like you’re Maude’s Dishwasher,” Mo said. “Laura’s Rose.”
Laura looked down. Her feet were filthy—Daniel’s and Mo’s were in a similar state—and she was wearing, what? A poodle skirt. She hadn’t even noticed.
“Clothes seemed the least of the problem,” Mr. Anabin said. “I took what was nearest to hand. Be quiet for a moment. There’s one here I don’t know. Who or what are you? What is your business?”
Something seemed to move, or perhaps something that had been in motion now grew very still. There was an exhalation, a sigh, as if Mr. Anabin had asked the air a question, and the fine hairs rose at the nape of Laura’s neck.
“Something touched me,” Daniel said. “I felt something.”
They all felt it now. It rushed around them, tugged at their ridiculous clothing, Laura’s cheerful skirt. The blue hair ribbon, which she hadn’t realized she was wearing, came undone and went whipping around the music room until Mo caught it as it flew past. He gave it to Laura, who tied her hair back with trembling fingers.
Mr. Anabin made that small motion with his hand again, and then here at last was the other one, the last one. But not altogether there, still not entirely. A pair of pale eyes. A mouth. The pencil Laura had dropped on the floor went sailing up into the air, point first, and stuck into the ceiling again.
“The end of the pencil is just as important as the other end,” Mo said. Laura had no idea what he meant by that. Mo, she was beginning to remember, said a lot of things that didn’t seem to mean anything.
“Speak,” Mr. Anabin said. “Tell us your name.”
“Oh,” a voice like the scrape of an empty lighter said. “That was lost a long time ago. So long ago.”
“Then pick a new one,” said Mr. Anabin. “Quickly.”
“They were all lost,” the voice said. “I lost them all.”
“Excuse me, but you can’t have lost them all?” Mo said. He pointed at one of Mr. Anabin’s posters. “I can think of hundreds. Hildegard. That’s a name. Aretha. Prince.” He pointed again. “Bowie.”
“Bowie,” the voice repeated.
“Bowie then,” Mr. Anabin said. “You’ll forgive me if you don’t resemble yourself, but time is short and there is very little of you left.” He blew on his hands, rubbed them together, and made another gesture, this one more extravagant.
And there was the last of the four, back in the world again. He wore Conrad Birdie’s biker jacket and white scarf. Was barefoot and dirty. Laura was certain she had never seen him before in her life. A boy their age. Longish, sandy hair and a white face she was not sure about. Human faces didn’t really look like that, did they? Like a box accidentally closed up with something alive inside it. Mismatched eyes like Bowie on the wall.
“Perhaps a bit too much like,” Mr. Anabin said, and gestured. And both eyes were blue.
“Can he do that?” Laura said to Daniel and Mo. “Just make a person? Is that what he did to us?”
“I could give you each six pairs of wings, a heart of glass, and poison glands,” Mr. Anabin said. “But there would be no point to it. You are as you were. I made you out of yourselves, what you were and had been.”
“I have no idea what that means,” Daniel said. “And I don’t want to know, either. We should go.”
Mo said, “Something happened, but I can’t remember it. Except that it was bad. We should all go home now before more bad things happen. Mr. Anabin, catch you later.”
“No!” Laura said. They all looked at her. The look on Mr. Anabin’s face was patient. Interested. His T-shirt gently encouraging. you are special in ways you don’t even know yet.
She said, “I mean, not yet. Mr. Anabin, how did we get here? What was that place, the place we were in before?”
“I’m leaving,” Mo said. It was as if Laura were not standing right there, as if her desires, her questions were immaterial, as if she herself were still immaterial. “You coming? Laura? Daniel? Bowie Not Bowie?”
“No!” Laura said. And stamped her foot. “I want to know what happened! I’m not leaving until I know.”
“It’s too late,” Bowie said. “He’s here.”
“Then tell him to go away,” Laura said. She didn’t look to see who Bowie meant. (If she didn’t look, then no one would be there.) “There are enough people here right now.”
“We were dead.” That was Daniel. “That’s what happened. That’s what you remember, Mo. That’s what you want to know, Laura. Isn’t it? We died. We were dead. Whose dog is that?”
Laura turned to look.
* * *
—
A large dog sat at the threshold of the music room. Maybe the music room door had been open all this time, though Laura thought it had been closed. (Or had not been there at all.) But then, how had she and the others come in—Through the windows? Like Cathy Earnshaw’s ghost?—and where had the dog come from? Laura began to wonder, looking at it, if it was a dog at all. That squashed feeling came over her again, except somehow the opposite was happening, too, as if she were shrinking and expanding at the same time. Her skin suddenly too loose and Laura—the most essential part of her—too small, so small she was suddenly afraid she might slip out of her own mouth or eyes and dissipate altogether, leaving only the emptied sleeve of her skin in a starched froth of poodle skirt.
Daniel had said something she knew she should have paid attention to. He’d said something, made some joke. Had it been funny? She’d wanted to laugh when he said it, but then she’d seen the dog.
The dog in the doorway had white fur, matted and coarse and bristling; a voluptuary’s red tongue lolled out. Its ears were latched flat against the prow of its head. It was such a very large dog the room seemed smaller: even Daniel seemed diminished in its presence. What was it Daniel had said?
“Good dog,” Mo said in a gentle voice. “Good doggie. Where did you come from? What a big, fucking, terrifying nightmare doggie. Yes. Yes, you are.”
“It isn’t a dog,” Daniel said. “It’s a wolf.”
“It isn’t a wolf,” Bowie said.
The thing on the threshold regarded each of them in turn as they spoke. It looked at Laura, its gaze reproachful and ravenous. At last it looked at Mr. Anabin.
Mr. Anabin’s hand went up as if he were about to make some gesture that would save them all, but instead he scratched his head, shrugged, and said, “You are welcome, Bogomil. As welcome as you ever are.”
Then Mr. Anabin turned his back to the open door, facing instead the windows and the night outside.
The thing upon the threshold had begun to shudder all over as Mr. Anabin spoke. It opened its jaws and panted. As Laura watched, it shimmied as if shucking off a too-tight dress, stretching and flexing, emitting little whining noises of discomfort, and then there was a person instead of a dog-wolf-thing, on his hands and knees upon the floor, person mouth split open in an airless yawn. The mouth closed. The person stood up, ran his hands down his face, then held them up to better examine his nails, which were, it was true, very dirty. His hands were filthy down to the wrists, as though he had been digging a hole in a muddy garden. He wore the Mayor’s costume from Bye Bye Birdie. Despite the dirt and the costume, he was by far the handsomest man Laura had ever seen. (Had she thought this the first time she saw him? Probably not. She could not remember the first time she had seen him.)
He had been a very large dog. But now he was not much taller than Laura. How old was he? Oh, not so very old. There are older things in the world. But still he was very old.
His bare feet like theirs were crusted with dirt. The only one wearing shoes in the music room was Mr. Anabin.
“Who are you?” That was Mo.
But Laura could tell that, like the rest of them, Mo knew.
“Am I really so forgettable?” the man said. He spoke softly enough Laura strained to hear what he was saying. He stayed where he was, leaning against the doorframe. There was something wolflike still in his posture, as if at any moment he might spring. “Quite a surprise, really, you gone from my house, all of you at once without so much as a thank-you note. And I don’t mind telling you it’s been some time since anything has surprised me.”
Laura thought, I’ve changed my mind. I’d like to leave.
“How?” Daniel said. “He’s standing in the doorway.” So perhaps she had said it out loud.
“I don’t like any part of this,” Mo said. His chin was out. “I don’t like the part where I’m wearing a costume from last year’s musical, and Bye Bye Birdie is really not a great musical anyway. I never liked it. There’s only one good song. It isn’t that good, actually. I don’t know if I remember you or not, wolf person, but I don’t like you, either. And I definitely do not like how I seem to remember some really bad stuff happening—thanks, Daniel, by the way, for reminding me—and I also don’t like the feeling I’m starting to get that, in a minute or so, something else bad is going to start happening. Like this is a bad sandwich. A sandwich where the filling is a middle-of-the-night school music room in between two slices of being dead. Who orders a sandwich like that? Nobody!”
“Will somebody please just explain what’s happening?” Laura said. “Please. Mr. Anabin? Mr. Anabin! Who is this person?”
Mr. Anabin stayed where he was, staring at the window, his back to them. Laura’s heart was beating so quickly in her chest she thought she might die. Had she died? Oh, but she was alive now. She had a heart, and her blood moved through her heart, and as it flowed it sang, Oh alive, oh alive!
