Onward, Pilgrim!
Discarded fiction
Her writing hadn’t gone well in such a long time. She considered perhaps she had done everything wrong from the outset. Graduation should have heralded a return to the world she absconded from but instead ushered her to conferences, internships, palladiums – all-new forms of experiential insularity, and maybe she found the sad end of her prior experience, had exhausted whatever remained of her childhood and, without constant reminder, banished the rest to signs and symbols, sucked them dry and left them empty. Empty and only full of cleverness, which is little more than a leather damask.
She lost her childhood. Not just the memory, which existed still in obscure tatters, but the shape, and its wearability. There is never any hope of return to the child-self. But there is hope of facsimile, of momentary restitution. No she could not remember the fire. She was a very cruel child and a very private one, because she could only be effectively cruel in private. She did tear wings off flies and throw pebbles at Carolina wrens. She did squeeze toads even though a teacher told her toads’ skins were very sensitive. Though she said nothing hateful to her classmates’ faces she was a notorious (and meticulous) gossip and liar. There was no doubt, in plenty of sudden school transfers and even an attempted suicide in the eighth grade, one could find the seeds of a rumor first spelled from her lips. She didn’t take joy in it or shame. If anything, there was obligation, that of a mechanism to perform a task, quite like using the restroom or, when she’s a bit older, masturbation.
For a brief period, around age 15 and 16, she was profoundly upset by the memory of these actions, and began writing about them out of hopes they could be excised. By eighteen, she had understood cruelty to be a potent subject if tempered with literary cleverness, and by twenty-two catalogued and rehabilitated every one of her cruelties, which were now something more than memory, less than experience, an overwhelming stylistic tendency that emptied itself with misuse.
The well drained, no experience outside her own academic career, and no prospects of gaining anything else. She had been given up for good, gave herself up and given up in trade, and rotted. Justified, with italics and underlined on an otherwise blank page — DO NOT ASK FOR GOLD, I’M HURT BADLY ENOUGH AS IT IS.
So Bailey decided to get married. Having exhausted everything else, she went to Mike (who else but Mike?) and he said yes, glowed yes, barely held himself together among the torrent of yes. He drifted in a sea of unconsidered happiness and completion. He didn’t believe anything could be so happy. At the moment she asked, he thought instantaneously of everyone he ever knew as a congealed mass, like a jellyfish, and the auburn, lazy locks on Bailey’s head obligingly served as the flowing limbs. The animal was foreign to him, oddly misshapen, as much as a congealed mass could have a designed shape. A few of the faces were foreign, too, disremembered classmates from grade school, camp counselors and summer-long crushes. Even remembering their place in the grander flesh of his experience, he could not shake the idea he had never seen the faces before. But anyway — anyway he was so very, completely happy, and Bailey smiled.
They got the marriage license two weeks later. They got married six weeks later, in a big family home in Westchester belonging to Mike’s grandmother. She had dimples as tall as the house’s strange Spanish porticoes. Everybody was there, Bailey was sure she didn’t forget anybody. To be sure, she made five separate lists of everybody in her life. The first, blood relations, one half-page. The second, college friends, about a page. The third, work friends, subdivided into ‘BOOKSTORE,’ ‘Bar on 118th,’ ‘MUSEUM,’ ‘Bar on 156th,’ altogether about a page with a lot of names scribbled over. The fourth, literary friends, which could have been longer, only she didn’t want to bring more pain than she deserved. The fifth, miscellaneous, was the longest, almost two pages. She couldn’t imagine a wedding, a sum-total event, unrivaled in its anthological comprehensiveness, without her old babysitter, her hairdresser from 9th grade who showed her, first, how to manage curly hair, her diving instructor, her 2nd grade reading teacher with the combover and the big copy of Infinite Jest lugged everyday in plaintive indecision, or the fruit seller she wrote a short story about freshman year of college, since that one was awfully good, if only because it was the first time she had ever considered a separate, unknowable and poetical life of ‘men,’ that the male inner-life could be different from her own womanly one, that now has reached its logical apex, herself invited to the inner-life of the manself, invited in holy matrimony to the man’s way of thinking and doing and forever, til death do them part, as pronounced man-and-wife.
And Mike too exhausted his own host of guests. The whole membrane came, made of family and friends and particularly enjoyed associates. All were represented except those unknowable faces without names, making up the ancillary fibers in the gelatin, and though he didn’t know them the fact they didn’t arrive did leave him feeling a bit unloved or at least unremembered, but the guests that did remember him were so happy to have done so he couldn’t stay somber long. And he was excited to show Bailey to this panoply of warm folk and the folk to Bailey.
She was happy to be strung along. All along, maybe since she first heard of marriage as a little girl, when she first became aware marriage was not only a way of being but also a particular event, she very badly wanted to be strung along and shown off to a large group of people, to be cast into a new life different from her last one and give everyone in her life the chance to see off the old Bailey and welcome the new one like she was boarding a boat to a faraway jungle where, if they did see her again, they’d barely even recognize her being she was so resolutely changed.
Among this crowd was a little girl who was Mike’s baby cousin. Mike’s baby cousin had dirty blonde curls, much too old-looking for her age, with a pink tutu and rubber leggings. She smiled very big and wrinkly, and immediately attached herself to Bailey. The two spent most of the night running about the house and trying various hors d’oeuvres splattered about the big viking’s tables in the reception room. For every one, Bailey would ask the baby cousin what she thought of it, and laugh as she struggled to spew out the words in between layers of baklava and artichoke dip. The child ate without savoring, without chewing if she could get away with it, her whole hand covered in saliva after every mouthful. She never tired of eating, either. The two of them hit every silver plate available and she still had room for a slice of cake as big as her head. Bailey found her smiling at the thought of the baby cousin’s overflowing stomach. Her little wrists, already plump in delicate rolls, would certainly double in size when she’s older. She’ll probably worry about her weight in a few years and even remember, as a terrible turning point, this night, and regret the dizzying food-safari her new cousin-in-law roped her into, wishing she could go back and slap the delicious treats out of her hands. Bailey chuckled.
‘Mommy!’ She hissed. ‘Don’t laugh!’
Bailey stared blankly at the baby cousin, then smiled. ‘Your mommy can laugh if she wants to. It’s her wedding day.’
When the ceremony finished, they left, somewhat in a hurry and somewhat just drunk. She was less drunk so she drove, and Mike slept pretty early into the ride. His sleeping face was very tender-looking, and to her surprise, his face did look very new, like the face of Mike the boyfriend was different from the sturdy, beaver-like countenance of Mike the husband. She took a photo at a red light and compared it to one on his Instagram from a couple months ago and though they looked near-identical she still felt confirmed she had positively transformed the figure beside her.
She stopped at the last gas station before the city. It was very crowded and she, still in her wedding dress, demanded the attention of the whole lot of them. They stared blackly, with worn faces suddenly injected with new, desperate energy. If they did speak to her, Bailey couldn’t hear them, only shot brave looks their way, which silenced them even if they kept talking.
She picked an ice coffee can from one of the side fridges and a bag of pretzels, and brought them to the counter. An older woman with very beautiful droopy hair, the color more of a fading teakwood than gray, checks her out and tells her congratulations.
‘Thank you.’
‘Where’s your husband?’
‘In the car.’
She peers over Bailey’s shoulder and notices the little BMW in one of the front parking spots.
‘He looks very handsome,’ she murmurs, though she couldn’t possibly have seen him, in a sense just invented him, in which case Bailey felt doubly grateful she invented him good-looking.
‘Yes, I think so too.’
‘You’d better.’
When she left the counter, a child latched on the hem of her skirt. He had no shoes on and a big pair of pink novelty sunglasses that clashed violently with a blue, longsleeve swimshirt. She wasn’t sure what to say. He had tears in his eyes but they just stood there, no hope of spilling out, like they were up for an unknown propriety.
Eventually, maybe after the excitement of a woman in her finest wore off, he let go, his pudgy hand pink with either cold or light burns, and he disappeared behind a shelf of WD-40 and bugspray. Bailey followed after him but he just kept running away.
‘Are you lost? Are you lost?’ She kept whispering. The child kept turning corners, silently. Turned corners with a tactician’s genius, always managing to end up behind Bailey, stepping one foot on the end of her dress and nearly tipping her over completely.
Bailey sighed. The dress now unforgivably dirty, the cold coffee staining her forearm a sickly brown, she left the store. The child became a kind of ghost to her, a pleasant but embarrassing hallucination she would tell no one.
She walked toward her car and saw Mike still asleep, a pittance of drool darkening on his chin and his hands assembled across his eyes and nose. The crowd outside grew but the rabidness of their interest in her vanished. Now with her dirty lace and the sweat loops down her scalp. They climbed back into their cars or returned to their idle rhythms wishing her to leave if she was just gonna stand around like that all night. The air was dense with wet chill, the aluminum can burned the web of her finger and she wished very badly to sleep just like Mike.
‘Hey!’ A voice called out, so loud and soaring across the density of the night, almost foreign in its loudness and foreignness.
The little boy, sunglasses in his hands, stares brightly at her. The whole crowd stares at him, too, but when they see he is totally fixated on Bailey, they sense a scandal, a betrayal of the amusing innocence she first represented, and avert their gaze, to keep what tattered joy they still hold intact./ Bailey sets the coffee and pretzels on the hood of the car and runs after the boy, who runs, too, into the bush behind the store.
She had since thrown the veil into the shrubbery and kicked up her dress far above her knees. Behind the bushes, a large ditch, frosted over in peach-colored grasses and thin, filmy dirt, faces the night. Mice or hares scurry out from the bush as the two dart nearer the ditch. Bailey tries to cry out to the boy but can’t manage it between strides. The boy is not so fast but the dress gets caught on every bramble, pine needle and berry stalk in the way.
The long sleeve of his jacket flows wildly in his wake. The boy has only one arm. She is only somewhat revolted by this realization. Only she was very angry now, at what she couldn’t say, without a proper interrogation there really was no telling, and she had none of the energy needed for such a venture. Now, flushed with cuts and bruises, her feet sliding down the crumbling soil forming the ditch’s southern lip, she could only fume at what she considered a terrible dishonesty. The lack did not disable him. At least, it did not unify him as disabled in her eyes. He was not a disabled child, but in fact a lying, evil imp. He simply had to be caught, had to be returned to his parent’s side — parent’s, yes, she thought, he certainly only has one parent, though the symmetry seemed hilarious it also couldn’t be denied as true, he had one arm, one parent, and one pursuer.
Eventually, she did catch him, the empty sleeve wrapped around her wrist, she pulled him close, and they both tumbled down, sliced and beaten by the endless barrage of sharp pebbles and dead tree matter.
Though her arms and especially her stomach and breasts felt considerably pained, a sore from her hairline trickled red into her right eye and stung a cut on her lower lip, she did not budge her grip on the boy, practically smothered him to immobility. He wriggled and squealed for a couple seconds, then stopped. Still, she didn’t move.
‘Get off!’ He cried, and beat his fist on her spine. She growled. There was a bout of hate in her she could not foresee the end of. All she could think to do was let it run its course, exhaust the subject to completion. He flailed his legs uselessly, but managed to thrust his knee into her upper thigh. The growl turned to a pained wheeze, but still she couldn’t let up. Why let up now? There didn’t seem a reason, and even less reason for him to rebel. She just couldn’t, isn’t that enough? The question only forced more weight on the boy, the point of her elbow jabbed to his collar like a blade. She just couldn’t. A will of frenzy split her open — dispelled her joints, swelled her brain twice its size. Her thinking rose and simmered, burned among her loins. She didn’t know what she was telling herself really. She knew, or at least hoped, that she’d have to be telling herself something. He may run off again, he might hurt himself, he has a parent somewhere that misses him dearly. Whatever it was, it worked,shielded her from any recognition that would deflate her corroded, bloated thinking.
A breeze stammered among the grasses and sent more dirt to both their mouths. The boy coughed like he was choking. Other than that, he lent no more protests, only kept his thrusts into her pelvis, which only made her bury deeper into his collar. They both shared painful welps, then silence, and again, in syncopated relay. Even as the fever subsided, she could only barely release some of the pressure. An ancient force in the night steered her. They certainly battled on an Indian burial ground, some native relic cracked her open, forcing cruelty down her throat. She believed cruelties are inherent to the human condition, only she didn’t believe they got there on their own. She couldn’t, not now, think, anything at all of herself, in herself, with herself. Everything could only be external, beyond her reach.
She felt a hand barely touch her shoulder blade, but didn’t turn around.
Mike called to her. Upset by a lack of response, he probably peered over her shoulder and saw the boy, now still, eyes shut in a weak sleep. The empty sleeve spun out in a lazy, serpentine curl, like Arabic lettering.
He nudged her back again. Harder. She turned and glared at him, and obediently, he kept silent. Bailey was so glad for his silence. More than ever, she really needed to hear herself think.