The Marriage of Sticks

      “I don’t even know what itis. Strange things have been going on ever since Hugh and I moved in.”
      “Is that why Frances wanted us to come see her? Tell me the truth, Miranda.”
      “Yes. But how do you know about it? What is it?”
      “Frances called it the Surinam Toad. That comes from some line by Coleridge—the poet? She made me memorize it. ‘My thoughts bustle along like a Surinam toad, with little toads sprouting out of back, sides, and belly, vegetating while it crawls.’
      “When I was young it tried to kill me, but Frances saved my life. It happened here in the house.” He sat down at the table. He slowly looked at the debris around the room and pursed his lips. “Here we go again. I thought all that was over a long time ago. The fuckin’ toad is back.”
      I went to a drawer and took out a box of Band-Aids. I handed them over and sat down across from him. “Can you tell me about it?”
      “I haveto tell you about it now. Remember when you asked me if I knew anyone who had powers? Frances has powers. She—”
      There was a loud scraping sound. I jerked in my seat and looked across the room. The trunk lid was moving. It dragged slowly across the floor toward us. The other pieces began moving too. The room was filled with the racket of this terrible slow scraping sound everywhere, the long high screech of sharp metal edges digging a path. A deep white line appeared behind the trunk lid as it gouged a wavy path across the wooden kitchen floor.
      I reached across the table, and slid my hand across his cuts. Blood was still oozing from them; it spread onto my fingers. Standing, I walked to the closest piece of metal and wiped the blood across it. The movement, the sound, everything stopped instantly. The silence was immense.
      McCabe stuck his hands under his armpits, as if trying to hide them. “What’d you do? Why did it stop?”
      I couldn’t answer. I wasn’t sure. Instinctively I had known how to stop the pieces from moving, but howI knew was unclear. My mind worked furiously to put it in focus.
      A house! It was like a house I’d lived in all my life. It had a certain number of rooms I knew by heart, every angle, the view from each window, But suddenly this house contained twice as many rooms, all filled with unfamiliar things. But it was my house. It had always been my house—I just hadn’t known about these extra rooms and what they contained.
      McCabe glared at me, hands still hidden. “Huh? You know things too, don’t you, Miranda? How did you know what to do?”
      “Blood stops it. I… I just know blood stops things.”
      “Yeah, great. But what now? What the hell happens now?” Without waiting for an answer, he left the room. I stood and listened while he did exactly what I had done—went to the front door and tried to open it. I heard his steps, the door rattling, curses when it wouldn’t open.
      His steps crossed the floor again but instead of returning to the kitchen, they began climbing the stairs. He was talking but I couldn’t make out his words. I looked at the debris around the kitchen and part of my mind thought it was funny. Miranda’s junkyard. Come into my kitchen and find a bumper for your BMW. Then I’ll make you lunch. Part of you stops being scared when the sane world of a moment ago goes mad.
      If Hugh had been in the backyard the other day, he might still be around. I had nothing to lose. “Hugh? Are you here?”
      Nothing.
      “Hugh? Can you hear me?”
      The kitchen door swung open. But it was McCabe.
      “Come with me. Hurry up.”
      I followed him out of the kitchen and trailed behind as he started back up the stairs.
      “You like dolls?”
      His question was so absurd and out of place that I stopped climbing. “What?”
      “Do you like dolls? I asked if you like ‘em.” His voice was urgent, as if everything depended on my answer.
      “ Dolls? No. Why?”
      Narrowing his eyes, he stared at me as if he didn’t believe it. “Really? Well then, that’s bad news. ‘Cause they’re in the same room as before. So I guess the same goddamnedthing’s happening again! Only Frances isn’t around to get us out this time.”
      “What are you talking about, McCabe?”
      “You’ll see.”
      Then the realization hit me. “I did. I used to love dolls when I was a girl. I collected them.”
      When we reached the first floor he walked down the hall to Hugh’s and my bedroom and threw open the door. “ Somebodylikes dolls.”
      Before moving to Crane’s View, we had bought a new bed. There should have been only two things in that room—the new bed and a small leather couch I had owned for years. Nothing else.
      Instead, our bedroom was full of dolls. On the new bed, the couch, most of the floor. They were stuck on the walls, across the entire ceiling, the windowsill. They blocked most of the light from coming in the window. Hundreds, maybe even a thousand dolls. Large ones, small; flat faces, fat faces, round; with breasts, without; wearing jeans, dirndls, evening gowns, clown costumes…
      All of them had the same face—mine.
      “Leave me alone in here, Frannie.”
      “What? Are you crazy?”
      “That’s what they want. They want me alone in here.”
      He glared but didn’t speak.
      “The same thing happened in here with Frances, right? In thisroom. The same thing. Were there dolls?”
      His eyes dropped. “No. People. People she said she knew from a long time ago.”
      I was about to respond when the first voice spoke. A child’s, it was quickly joined by another and then another until we were surrounded by a deafening cacophony of voices saying different things at once. We stood in the doorway listening until I began to make out what some of them were saying.
      “Why do we always have to go to Aunt Mimi’s house? She smells.”
      “But you promisedI could have a dog.”
      “Dad, are stars cold or hot?”
      On and on. Some voices were clear and understandable. Others were lost in the surrounding swirl of tones, whines, whispers. But I understood enough. All of them, all of these words and sentences, were my own, spoken in the various voices I had owned growing up. The first one I disentangled was the line about the stars. I knew it immediately because my father, an astronomer, had loved it and repeated it to others throughout my childhood.
      My Aunt Mimi didsmell. I hated visiting her.
      My parents finally relented and gave me a dog, which was stolen three weeks later. I was nine at the time.
      If I had remained in that bedroom long enough, I assume all the words of my lifetime would have been repeated. Instead of life passing in front of my eyes, my words were entering my ears. Some of them tweaked memories, most were nothing but the verbal spew of twelve thousand days on earth. I once read that a person speaks something like a billion words in the course of a life. Here were mine, all at once.
      “Go out. Wait downstairs.”
      “Miranda—”
      “Do it, Frannie. Just go.”
      He hesitated, then put his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll be outside in the hall. Just outside if you need me.”
      “Yes. All right.”
      The moment he closed the door behind him, the room fell silent.
      “Miranda, would you do me a big favor?”
      There had been so much noise, so many loud and clashing voices seconds ago that this one with its simple question rising so suddenly out of the new silence was especially disturbing. Because it was a man’svoice and very familiar.
      “Sure. You want a backrub?”
      “No. I’d like you to go with me to the drugstore.”
      “Right now? Dog, I’ve got to be at the airport in a few hours and you know how much I still have to do.”
      “It’s important, Miranda. It’s really important to me.”
      My back was to the door. Turning around, I saw an entirely different room behind me: a hotel room in Santa Monica, California. Doug Auerbach sat on the bed in there. A game show was yapping on the television. Doug was watching me as I came out of the bathroom wrapped in a white towel.
      It was the day we went to the drugstore because he’d dreamed about doing that together. The day I flew back to New York and saw the woman in the wheelchair by the side of the freeway.
      I stood in the corner watching a part of my life happen. Again. Only this time there were two me’s in the room—the one living the moment and the one who watched.
      “What’s wrong with this picture?” James Stillman said as he walked out of the bathroom. Dog Auerbach and Miranda continued talking. They did not react to him. “Where’s Waldo?” James smirked, and that look, that one precise facial expression I remembered so well down the years was as frightening in that moment as anything else.
      “Why am I here, James? What am I supposed to do?”
      “Stop whining and asking questions. You’re here because someone wantsyou here, Miranda. Figure it out! Stop playing the poor little puppy. You waste so much time crying why me.”
      His voice was cold and mean. I stared at him and he stared right back. I began to move around the motel room, looking carefully at everything, hoping for a clue, listening to the two talk. Light from the window lit the half-filled water glass on the night table. An orange candy bar wrapper lay twisted on the floor. A book. A green sock on the bed.
      “Can I touch things?”
      James smirked again. “Do whatever you want. They don’t know we’re here.”
      I reached out and touched Doug’s arm. He didn’t react. I shook him, or rather I shook but he didn’t move. He continued talking. I picked up an ashtray and threw it across the room. It banged loudly against a wall but neither of them acknowledged the sound.
      I walked to the window and looked out. The afternoon sun was a used-up yellow-orange. Out on the sidewalk a bum wearing a brightly colored serape and a black beret pushed a supermarket cart filled with junk. Two kids on skateboards whizzed by. He shouted at them.
      The first surprise was that I could hear every word the bum said, although the window was closed. Next was the realization, like a hard, unexpected slap in the face, that I suddenly knew everything about this man. His name was Piotr “Poodle” Voukis. Sixty-seven years old, he was a Bulgarian йmigrй from Babyak who had worked as a janitor at UCLA for twenty years until he was fired for drinking. He’d had two sons. One was killed in Vietnam.
      On and on, my mind flooding with every detail of this man’s life. I knew his most intimate secrets and fears, the names of his lovers and enemies, the color of the model motorboat he had built and sailed in Echo Park with his sons when they were young and life was as good as it would ever get for him. Then I saw the room at UCLA hospital where he spent desolate months sitting by his wife’s bed as abdominal cancer dissolved her insides until there was nothing left but a dark and fetid pudding.
      Everything about him, I knew everything in his now dim and addled brain.
      Aghast, I turned away. The second I did, my mind emptied and I was myself again. Onlymyself.
      For a moment.
      James said something and without thinking I looked at him. At once I saw the rushing view through the windshield of his car as it sped toward his death in Philadelphia. I saw the tattooed words on his last lover Kiera’s wrist. I experienced his feelings for Miranda Romanac—nostalgia, resentment, old love… all wrapped tightly around each other like leaves on a cabbage.
      As with the bum on the street, the moment I looked at James Stillman I became him.
      This time I screamed and staggered. Because of a fear that was not my own: James was absolutely petrified of me. Having become him, I knew why he was afraid and what had to be done. I am not a brave person and have never pretended to be, so what I did next was the bravest act of my life. I have regretted it ever since.
      Looking around, I saw what I needed, but was so unbalanced that I scanned the room twice more before it registered. A mirror. A small oval mirror above the desk.
      I looked into it.
 
      A MAN IN a black suit and floor-length silk cape stood alone in the middle of the stage of a giant theater. He was tall and handsome, immensely alluring in a frightening way. Everything about him was black—his clothes, patent leather shoes, gleaming hair like licorice. Even the intense whiteness of his skin accentuated the darkness. Just looking at him, I knew here was a man capable of real magic.
      Staring directly at me, he said my name in a thundering voice. How could he know my name when I had never seen him before this night? With one languid hand, he beckoned for me to join him on stage. I looked at my mother and father, who were sitting on either side of me. Both smiled their permission and enthusiasm. Father even put his hand against my back to move me more quickly. The audience began to applaud. I was terribly embarrassed to be the center of attention, but loved it at the same time. I sidled out of our row and walked down the wide aisle to a short staircase on the side of the stage.
      At the top of the stairs an easel supported a large poster announcing the name of the performer:
 
       THE ENORMOUS SHUMDA
       SHUMDA DER ENORM
       BAUCHREDNER EXTRAORDINAIRE
 
      As I climbed the stairs the audience clapped harder. Worrying I would trip and fall in front of everyone, I walked carefully to center stage, where the man in black stood.
      He put up a hand to stop the applause and it died instantly. There was a stop while all of us waited for what he would do next. Nothing. He simply stood there with his hands behind his back. It went on too long. Unmoving, he stared into the audience. We waited restlessly but it went on and on.
      Just as people began to whisper their dismay, shifting impatiently in their seats, a dalmatian wandered out onto the stage. It darted back and forth sniffing the floor excitedly and came to us only after it had jittered around like that awhile. Some in the audience laughed or scoffed out loud.
      Shumda did nothing to stop the titter. He continued his silence and staring. We stood in front of hundreds of people but the only thing that had happened since I’d stepped onto the stage was the arrival of the dog. When it felt like the whole theater would explode with tension and exasperation, the dog leaped in the air and did a perfect back flip. On landing, it bellowed out in a beautifully deep man’s voice, “Be quiet! Have you no manners? What’s the matter with you people?”
      Deadpan, Shumda looked at the dog, then at me. He gave me the smallest possible wink. He looked back at the audience, same deadpan, and slipped his hands into his trouser pockets.
      After the dog spoke, gasps and shocked yelps of laughter burst from the audience.
      The dog then sat down and adjusted itself until it was comfortable. It continued in the same pleasingly virile voice that was not at all like the ventriloquist’s. “Since you seem displeased with Shumda, I will now take over the show. Master, if you please?”
      Shumda bowed deeply first to the audience, then to the dog. It dipped its head as if acknowledging the bow. Then the man in black turned and left the stage.
      When he was gone and there was no possible way the ventriloquist could be within fifty feet of the animal, the dog spoke again.
      “And now for my next trick, I would ask the young lady—”
      Pandemonium. How could the dog speak if the ventriloquist was now off the stage?
      The animal waited patiently until the audience quieted. “I would ask the young lady to step to the front of the stage and hold her arms out from her sides.”
      I did it. Four feet from the edge, I stopped and slowly lifted my arms. Because I was standing so far forward, I couldn’t see the dog when it spoke again. I looked out over the sea of attentive faces and knew they were looking at me, me, me. I had never been so happy in my life.
      “What is your favorite bird?”
      “A penguin!” I shouted.
      The audience roared and applauded. Their laughter continued until the dog spoke again.
      “A formidable bird, certainly; one with great character. But what we need now is a championship flyer. One with wings like an angel, able to cross continents without stopping.”
      I licked my lips and thought. “A duck?”
      Another gale of laughter.
      “A duck is a brilliant choice. So, my dear, close your eyes now and think of flying. It’s daybreak; the sky is the color of peaches and plums. See yourself rising off the earth to join your fellow pintails on the journey south for the winter.”
      I closed my eyes and, before I knew it, felt nothing beneath my feet. Looking down, I saw that nothing wasbeneath my feet: I was a foot, then two, five, ten feet above the stage and rising. I was a child and was flying.
      As I rose, I began to float out over the audience. Looking down, I saw people with their heads bent back, all of them staring at me in wonder. Mouths open or hands over their mouths, hands to their cheeks, arms pointing up, children bouncing in their seats; a woman’s hat fell off.… All because of me.
      Where were my parents? I could not find them in the dark mass of heads below.
      I continued to float out until I’d reached the middle of the theater. Once there, I rose even higher. How did the birds do this? How heavy humans were! Gently I rose again. My hands were spread in front of me but not far out—more like I was playing a piano. I wiggled my fingers.
      My body stopped as I floated seventy feet above the crowd in the center of the theater. No wires attached to my back, no tricks, nothing but the genuine magic of a talking dog.
      Time stopped and there was complete silence in the theater.
      “What are you doing? Are you mad?” Below, Shumda marched quickly out onstage, looking up at me and then at the now cowering dalmatian.
      “But, Master—”
      “How many times have I told you? Dogs cannot do these things! You don’t know what you’re doing!”
      Tentative laughter from the audience.
      “Bring her down! Immediately!”
      But I didn’t want to come down. I wanted to stay weightless for the rest of time while people below looked up and wished they could be me. Staring forever, rapt, at me the angel, the fairy – I could fly!
      “Bring her down!”
      I dropped.
      Falling, I saw only faces. Horror, surprise, wonder frozen on their faces as they saw me drop straight at them. The faces grew larger. How fast does a child fall? How long does it take till impact? All I remember is fast and slow. And before I was scared, before I could even think to scream, I hit.
      And died.

10. PAINTING HEAVEN

      “DARLING, ARE YOU all right?”
      The words poured slowly into my mind like thick, glutinous sauce. Brown gravy.
      With great difficulty I opened my eyes and squinted hard at the first thing I saw. It was awful. Jarring and fragmented, the colors were a bad, gaudy, incomprehensible mix adding up to nothing but mess. If they had been brass instruments, their squawks and squeals would have made me cover my ears and run away.
      But as my head cleared, I remembered with a terrible sinking feeling that what was in front of me was mine—I had painted it. I had beenpainting it for months and months, but nothing I did made it better. Nothing.
      Maybe that’s why I had been having the blackouts with increasing regularity. Lying on my back longer and longer each day painting the fresco on the ceiling of the church. The church I had connived Tyndall into buying. The fresco that, when finished, was supposed to have convinced the others I was a real painter. Not just everyone’s mistress. Not just the great pair of tits who the famous ones let stay because I was always available. The Arts Fucker, as De Kooning called me to my face. But when I was done, they would see. See that I was far, far better than any of them had ever imagined. My fresco would prove it.
      It had begun as such a wonderful idea. And the only reason for continuing to see Lionel Tyndall. Let him screw me to his heart’s content. Make him crazy for me; make myself into his drug. Then when he was hooked, use him. Use his money and connections to get what I really wanted—the respect of the likes of de Kooning and Eleanor Ward, Lee Krasner and Pollock. Yes, even that bastard.
      One of the few interesting things Tyndall ever said was about them, the great ones: They had no empty space around them. He was right. My dream was to bring them here and show them what I had accomplished. How good the heaven was I had painted on the ceiling of Lionel Tyndall’s church. The church he bought me out of the deepness of his lust and his pockets.
      In a sketchbook, I had written a line from Matisse that became my essential rule: “I tend towards what I feel: toward a kind of ecstasy. And then I find tranquillity.” Since beginning the church project, I had done everything I could to follow my instincts, to “tend towards” what I felt. But sadly what I felt was nowhere near what I had painted. Worse, I could no longer imagine even getting close. No empty spaces around them? There was nothing butempty space around—and in—what I had created.
      What’s worse, going through life trying to find your passion but never finding it, or knowingwhat you want but no matter how hard you try, never being able to accomplish it? I had wanted to be a painter for fifteen years and had done everything I could to achieve it. But it hadn’t happened, and, horribly, it was beginning to look like it never would.
      “Darling? Are you all right?”
      Tyndall’s voice sniveled up from below and made me shudder. He didn’t care if I was all right; he wanted me to come down so we could go outside and make love in his car or under a tree or in the water or somewhere. That was our unspoken deal. He bought the abandoned church outside East Hampton and gave me everything I needed to paint it. In return, I was expected to climb down and play with him whenever he called.
      But the blackouts I’d been having? Those dangerous spells once or twice a month where everything simply fell away and I came to with no memory of them happening?
      “Why don’t you come down and we’ll have some lunch. You’ve been up there since seven this morning.”
      I stared at the ceiling and thought about his hands, his breath on my neck, the thin musky smell of his body when he got excited.
      I turned on my side to look down at him. As I did, there was a loud sharp crack from below. Alarmed, I tried turning completely over. But all at once there was a second crack, a high wheee-yowof scaffold metal bending, and everything collapsed.
      I dropped.
      The last thing I saw, before a metal bar snapped off the scaffolding and flew through my throat, was one of the faces I had painted on the ceiling.
 
      SCREAMING. THERE WAS screaming all around and not just human. Metal—the scream and grind of metal against metal for seconds, then gone. Nothing breaking or snapping this time, only meeting. Meeting for earsplitting seconds in a fast hot sparking touch and gone. We flew. The car rocketed forward. I opened my eyes again onto bright sunlight after the tunnel’s blackness. We twisted, rose, turned. A fresh gust of screaming from the children in our car. We went up up up, almost stopped, then fell into the intricate loop and swing of the roller-coaster track.
      I looked at James. His hair was flattened against his head. Staring straight ahead, he wore a crazy adrenaline smile. As we sped along I kept watching him, trying to find in his face what had been palpable all day but not clear until now. The moment he turned and looked at me, I knew: I no longer loved him.
      It was my eighteenth birthday. James had suggested we go to Playland to celebrate. It had been a wonderful day. We were leaving for different universities in two weeks and had never been closer. But now I knew we would not go beyond those two weeks. No matter what we’d said about writing and calling and Christmas vacation isn’t so far away… I no longer loved him.
      As the roller coaster curved and fled down the track toward the now visible end of the ride, I let out a sob so strange and violent that it sounded like a bark.
 
      “Do YOU KNOW what I love about you?”
      We sat on a bench eating cotton candy and watching people pass by. I pretended to be busy working a piece of the sweet pink gunk off my fingers and into my mouth. I didn’t want to know what James loved about me, not now, not anymore.
      “I feel famous in your arms.”
      “What?”
      “I don’t know. I just feel famous when I’m in your arms. When you’re holding me. Like I mean something. Like I’m important.”
      “That’s a really nice thing to say, James.” I couldn’t look at him.
      But he took the cotton candy out of my hand and turned my face to his. “It’s true. You don’t know how much I’m going to miss you next year.”
      “Me too.”
      He nodded, assuming we were thinking the same sad thoughts, and that made me feel even worse. I felt my throat thicken and knew I was about to start crying. So I squeezed my eyes closed as tightly as I could.
 
      INSTANT SILENCE. IT was huge after the roar of the amusement park ride. When I looked, thirty-year-old James sat in the bay window across the Crane’s View bedroom watching me. All of the dolls were gone. It was once again the room I had shared too briefly with Hugh Oakley.
      “Welcome back. What’d you learn on your tour?”
      “All those women were me. The little girl flying, the painter, me with you at Playland… All lived different lives but they were the same… person inside. And the only thing they thought about was themselves. They were all total egotists. Were there others? Have I lived other lives, James?”
      “Hundreds. They would have shown you more of them but you’re smart—you saw it with the three most recent.”
      “And all of the people in them were connected.” I touched my ten fingertips together. “Shumda was Frances’s boyfriend. The little girl went to his show. And the woman painting the fresco was Lolly Adcock, wasn’t she?”
      James nodded and said sarcastically, “Who tragically fell to her death just before the world recognized her talent. She died in 1962. Miranda Romanac was born in ‘62. The little girl died in 1924. Lolly was born the same year.”
      “You were involved in that scandal about the fake Adcock paintings. And Frances owned a real one.”
      He pointed at me. “So did Hugh, but didn’t know it. Those four pictures of the same woman he had? Lolly painted them when she was studying at the Art Students League.”
      “They’re paintings of the little girl who fell at the theater, aren’t they? What she would have looked like if she’d lived and grown up. Lolly thought she was imagining them. That’s why I felt so strangely about those pictures. Like I knew the woman in them even though I’d never seen her before.”
      James winced and drew a short harsh breath. “How do you know that?”
      “ How? For God’s sake, James, what do you think I just went through? What do you think all this is all about? Don’t play games. I thought you were here to help me.”
      “No, you’re here to help me. Miranda. You’re here to get me the fuck out! I’m not here for you—I’m here for me. Let me go free, please! I’ve done everything I can. I’ve shown you what I know. You knew about those paintings; you knew who the subject was. I didn’t. Don’t you see? I’m done. I’ve given you everything I’ve got. So let me go now. Free me!”
      “Why is all this happening to me now? Why suddenly now?”
      He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
      “Where is Hugh now?”
      “I don’t know.”
      “Who am I?”
      Leaping up, he started toward me, furious. “I don’t know! I’m here because I was supposed to tell you what I knew. What I know is, you’re reincarnated. Everything in all of the lives you have lived is interconnected. Everything. And each time you’ve lived you cared only for yourself. The girl in the theater was a bratty, selfish kid. Lolly Adcock used people like toilet paper. You… Look what you did to me, even after you knew you didn’t care anymore. And Doug Auerbach. The guy with the video camera who came into your store and hit you. You broke up Hugh’s marriage because you were selfish and you wanted him.… Always you first, no matter what.”
      “Why did they make you come for me? Who are they?”
      “Miranda? You all right in there?” McCabe’s voice through the door made both of us turn. James gestured toward it.
      “Your friend’s waiting.”
      “Who are they, James? Just tell me that.”
      Lifting his chin, he slowly twisted his head to one side, like a confused dog.
      “Miranda, open up!”
      “I’m okay, Frannie. I’m coming.”
      James’s voice was a high plea. “Please – let me go.”
      Without looking, I opened my left hand. Lying on my palm was a small silvery-white stick. Written on it in perfect brown calligraphic letters was James Stillman.
      It began to smoke. It flared into rich flame. Although it burned brightly in the center of my hand, I felt no heat or pain. It was hypnotic. I couldn’t take my eyes away. The flame danced and grew and spread up my arm. I felt nothing.
      Someone said my name but I only half heard the man’s voice. James? McCabe? I looked up. No one was there—James was gone.
      Then pain came like a roaring explosion. My arm was agony. I screamed and shook it, but the flame only ate the wind thus created and blossomed upward. My skin went red, orange, molten, and shiny as oil.