In the psychologist’s office, there is a mottled oak bookcase in the Craftsman style, a desk of the same, plush chairs, two rugs in concentric Hygge patterns, a framed photo of a crooked oak and a thrift-store painting of a dove nestling with her chicks. Outside the conifers are bristling and the sky rumbles into a melange of inarticulate grays. Under an acrylic shade, a low-watt bulb radiates languid heat. There is an osmosis between the rippling of the outdoors and the sleepy office, which, like the tick-tock of a stage hypnotist’s pendulum, leads the client, thirty-something and hastily dressed, with uncertain eyes, down into an old environ—a recess unattended by time, unstirred by any weather.
“You got the pictures I sent, right?”
“There were a number. Did you want to talk about them today?”
“What did they look like to you?”
“Well, I’m certainly no art critic, but they—well, they clearly came from a place of passion. Very different from the other work you’ve shown me. But I’m not here to assume or interpret; I want to learn about your experience. Would you like to tell me a little about where those pictures came from?”
“You wouldn’t believe me. It’s ridiculous, it sounds insane.”
“I guarantee you I’ve heard much worse. This is what I’m here for. Please, tell me—if you’d like.”
He pauses momentarily. “Right. My whole life I haven’t known whether it’s a dream, a false memory... It seems impossible, but it’s so vivid and it’s right there—it makes sense chronologically, I mean. Right there between my sixth birthday and the start of first grade. We went camping a lot. Mom and Sara were part of—they called it the Sisters of Bacchus back then, I don’t know what it’s called these days, but it was this kind of neo-paganist woodland retreat. They’d go out there, burn incense and sing in rounds, garland each other with the holly branches and the wildflowers. Lily turned me on to Ovid recently, and I was pretty baffled when I read the Metamorphoses and saw his Maenads: ripping wild animals open with their hands, thrashing guys with sticks and all that. My Maenads were forty-something lesbians with art education degrees. I’d seen more vaginas by age six—the real thing but also watercolor, charcoal, sculptures in clay and porcelain—than any of my friends had by twenty. Honest to god, I’d have dreams where I was out in a cornfield and a huge, pulsating red vagina would swoop down from the sky at hyperspeed, like a UFO, and swallow me up. Pussies, they called them.
“It was late afternoon, the sun was low and they were foraging, I think—gathering mushrooms, which looking back on it now were clearly psychedelic—and something, a glint of light or a noise from a bush, caught my attention. I wandered off; nobody noticed I had gone.” He glances at the picture on the wall. “I didn’t want to be near them, Mom and Sara, with their huge black eyes; whenever they tripped, it was like the mushrooms reached up from underneath and took them, like they were there but they’d been led off somewhere else. Between the bushes there was a passageway, just enough room for me to squeeze under on my belly. I remember little pinpricks of light rustling on the dirt where the leaves parted, pushing and pushing my way through to the grove. There were burs all over my legs; I was naked. The air was damp and it smelled thick, between the cedars and cypresses, where I thought I saw more light slipping—light, a voice, I’m not sure. But I was gone. Lost. Nowhere near the campgrounds, and the sunset was so heavy, like I was breathing in hot curdled milk every time I looked up. Fireflies were lighting up, circling tight around me. The mulch rustled with small animals and insects. Everything was saturated with the orange and the pink of the sunset, even between the trees as I wove through, almost running, sick of Bacchus and all the mushrooms and the fat-bellied women with their blubbering mouths full of sage advice. It was the last year I was allowed at the festival, boys couldn’t be there past age 6; maybe I was a little pissed off. The trees came down tight and pushed me in at odd angles, and I could barely see through the canopy when I squeezed through a passage and found myself in an oval clearing, swarmed with fireflies, clustered with yellow sedge and bluebonnets. At the edge of my vision I saw two deer, slowly circling the border; the stag bellowed and the doe looked right at me—not to anthropomorphize, but honest to God—it was scared, but almost perversely, like it liked being afraid. Like it wanted me there to witness. A gash of red ran down its side, and I could see right through to the purple and the pink, the intestine.
“I came toward them, thinking somehow I could help; the stag charged, or something did, and I hauled ass, practically tumbling over, batting back the low branches with my arms, trampling the yarrow, until the trees parted and the sky was huge above me, jet black and fuchsia, glittering with stars. I was right by the beachside, bruised and slashed and crusted all over with blood and muck, almost crying. I didn’t know it was bad to say dykes back then. I didn’t go to school, didn’t have to have birthday parties. The deer were gone. A voice drifted in singing wordlessly across the shore, in echoes, low but bright and almost crystalline, and I could almost understand it—an old woman’s voice, like a heavy smoker. It was like—you know how, when you’re listening in on a conversation in another room, the words come in sort of hazy and half-formed? It was like that, but it wasn’t words, just raw meaning... That sounds nuts, right?” He pauses to stare at the psychologist, who smiles vacantly and makes a motion of dismissal. “Right. I looked around, craning my ears, and started off down the dunes and along the backshore—the voice was coming from further down, where the open beach broke into a grotto. The sand shone almost lavender under the starlight, too cold for summer. All the aquatic life was gone from the scene, like they’d left me on purpose, like the landscape had been hollowed out. Just the dead water and the sky. I’ve never felt so lonely in nature. The voice echoed off the water, swirling through me like a galestorm, rippling in my naked body. Before I knew it I was hemmed in by the cold blue tide-soaked rock of the grotto, and she was sitting right there above me.
“She was stark naked too, and elderly—ancient—I didn’t even know people got that old. Her matted hair drifted from her head in clumps, her tits sagged to her feet; her deflated gut was crawling with moths and maggots. A river of drool bubbled from the rim of her swollen, crust-covered lips. The stench of her almost drove me back to the water. I thought she had to be a nightmare, some awful future version of Sara or Mom or even me—I really still thought I might end up turning into that. But there was something in her eyes I couldn’t look away from. Like marbles, or stained glass when the light struck through it, or the eye of an alligator coming up from the swamp with a kill.
“‘Do you know, boy, what lies at the center of the Earth?’ I could hear her clearly through the song. ‘The scientists, idiots and cardsharps that they are, imagine it to be quite hot in there. A pressurized Hell of superheated metal, quivering with rage through the centuries. There is no supposition possible that could be further from the mark. In there, boy, you will find naught but folds upon folds of ice. Silent, radioactive ice. A temple to the monoxide snowfall, the sick tomato, with shimmering lily-petals of frost for pulpits and pews. This is where the Fates keep their bomb-shelter. The still place, the sacrifice for the world’s relentless motion. At the center of the center, the highest peak, there is a book, infinitely thick, with pages thin and brittle as light. Do you know what is in this book? You’ve heard about the Fates, haven’t you, boy? In the book—bovine child, you—is what they once called the Akashic Records. Here is recorded all past and future history, every millisecond of every waking life, every sway of every blade of grass, every brush of every hand—the whole of mankind a mote of dust among the innumerable races. It is a brute language, but sufficient. Aren’t you special to be told?’
“I was frozen, with my arms wrapped tight around me—I didn’t want to give my words away to this awful woman. ‘All your history, you see, has been decided. You’ve no say. You are but a plasticine doll in the playscape of the gods; all human time is a pinned butterfly, all human motion is not moving but being moved. Your kind’s chronicles are mere cartoons. I will tell you now; you shall keep this knowledge with you always. Such is your blessing.
“‘You haven’t yet heard of pornography, I assume? Well, you’ll become quite the connoisseur. In your art school days—you do like making little pictures, don’t you?—all your pocket change will go to moldy cartoon cels, faded illustrations, lithographs the age of your great-grandmother. A catalog you’ll revere like a church its saintly bones and fingernail clippings. Nasty things, these humans. A girl will put a stop to all this: a charming creature, two years older, with tawny curls and a ghost of marijuana in her kiss. She will be a writer. She will seem to have read all the books in Hell’s library, and a good chunk of Heaven’s, but she’ll rarely condescend. You shall be infatuated, in ways incomprehensible to children—quite a different love than that for jacks and hobby-horses. The ache will threaten to ruin you. One night you’ll return with her to her dormitory. In the wake of a thunderstorm, she will throw to the floor her blouse, her skirt, her undergarments. Between her legs will be the same genitals as yours: she will be a traveler between two sexes, a chemical hermaphrodite.’ I didn’t really understand what she meant; I still half-believed that mine would fall off when I was older. ‘As we speak she is a boy like you, on the West Coast, alone in an antiseptic steel kitchen. Having no real amusements in this life, she is toying idly with a toaster. In the coming years, she will become a woman and she will decide to love you, in her demure and bow-legged fashion, wading deeper in the lake of your cancer with every step. But that night, in the dormitory, her genitals will perplex you. Looking up from her mildewed futon, your loathing will exceed that for your mother’s kiss. ‘Between you there shall grow a quiet, formidable love; you shall marry; you shall not have children. Through it all—through warehouse parties and late-night conversations, first tentative collaborations and publishing deals, modest accolades, the slow creep of middle age—that loathing will persist, like a muffled heartbeat, each time you see her nude, each time you run your fingers along the small of her back. It will increase in exact proportion to your desire, your satiation in her form. A decade on there shall be another thunderstorm, upon the little home you’ve built, in the dead zone of midnight where the cicadas reign: you shall look at her, you shall love her like a blizzard suffocating the city, like a tempest of acid rain, and, without thinking, as naturally as falling asleep—you shall kill her.’”
He is shuddering and sobbing on the couch, hands shielding his face from the psychologist, who looks on with a weary smile and says:
“Well, you never would—would you?”
In the cabin on the forest’s edge, she is sitting before a picture window on a rustic couch, propping her laptop on her bent left leg. Outside the sky stirs. The clouds choke with rain, the first raindrops striking the soil. Behind her are his illustrations: watercolors, gouaches, photographs of clay models, childlike figures in heady midcentury palettes. There are animals—centipedes, falcons—rendered in a few blobby brushstrokes, springing out from the curvilinear trees. Every mammal has the same smile. On the laptop, she is rewriting a descriptive paragraph for their next chapter book. The protagonist, a boy of ten, sees before him on a hillock a herd of deer, grazing, the fawns huddled close to their mother; first she attempts to create an air of silence, shock, the boy as voyeur or unwitting intruder, then a swelling toward the moment of communion when his eye meets the mother’s eye, both parties still, beams of light breaking the clouds, a brief evaporation of difference; the deer scatter to the surrounding woods, propelled like spirits on their twig limbs, and the boy feels a heaviness behind his eyelids, the weight of unborn tears, without knowing why. She sincerely believes that if she can illustrate with enough conviction what will be lost, she might push back against the tide of losing. That, with a steady enough hand, she could halt the death of one flower, one blade of grass... She does love his work, but its world is still foreign to her. It rejects her habitation, cuts away from her rapture—what she thinks of as the innate emptiness of being. There is something prodigal about him, prodigal and heavy and red. Like a turkey’s wattle. She’s thought so since they met. A lash of thunder rattles the windows. The sky is thrashing, drumming the earth with cloudbursts; the shrieks of cicadas swirl the downpour and the mud. For an instant, a stab of lightning throws back the curtains of the storm in a farce of daylight. She hears a knock on the door, then two others; it creaks open and he’s right outside, hanging shadowed in the doorway. His sodden clothes flood the carpet.
“Hello!”
“Hi.”
“...What are you waiting for?” She chuckles. “It’s your house too.”
“Oh, right. Sorry—therapy today was a rollercoaster.” He takes off his overshirt, stumbles in and slumps into a large leather armchair.
“We could talk about it if you want.”
He makes a face. “It’s hard to—well, you know, it’s such a delicate process, I mean… It’s tricky. I still believe, and maybe I’m wrong about this, that there are certain things you should keep to yourself. I have nightmares where I’ll tell you this one thing, this one innocuous thing, and the whole world—you, me, the bed, the furniture—it all gets sucked away in an instant, spaghettified in some black hole at the back of my head. That kind of stuff is why I’m going in the first place, I guess.”
“If you’d ever like to share, I can wait. These cryptic little hints do get kind of tiring—it’s almost like you’re asking me to pry.” Another chuckle. “Any idea what you want to do for dinner? I checked and the ground bison’s still good.” He nods, bringing both legs close against him and swaddling them with his arms. His eyes, bloodshot, shift from the wall clock’s pendulum to the window, carefully evading her body.
The smell of the bison browning—the juices of the meat, the paprika, the fish sauce—fills the room as he stirs. She sits again at the picture window, watching the storm wipe out all traces of the woods, the night a miasma of slate-grays and velvet-blacks. And yet there is a redness—between the meat smell, the briefly frozen image of the storm like a scar flat on her plane of vision. He whistles a half-remembered tune. They eat.
In the bedroom, there is a large featherbed stuffed into an undersized oak frame, the wood raw, knotted, two casement windows facing the road and the forest, a faux fur rug and an armoire, also raw oak. She is on the bed, stripped down to her underwear—her special lingerie, worn on impulse or in anticipation—clutching the vibrator like a truncheon, her fingers draining where she squeezes. He is standing above her, his fly unzipped. His eyes flit to her face, her neck, and then the window where the storm tears open the meadow and the trees. Cicadas cry. The sheets shift as her body gyrates—back and forth, back and forth. Her eyes plead. “Baby, baby...” Taking a deep breath he lunges forward; he grips her wrist, slams it down near the nightstand, far from her genitals, and wrests the vibrator from her clinging fingers, throwing it to the floor with a clatter of plastic. His left hand held tightly on her right wrist, bleeding the soft skin white, he parts her lingerie and traces little circles around her anus with his index finger, not thinking about what’s signaling above, tumescent, portentous and olive-brown, the red flare of the glans, malicious, like a spear thrust again in his side, rending the soft things, pink and purple, the intestines of a frightened child dangling from the torn skin where she stabs in a trickle of red, the slow death, like water torture—but how easy it would be to trace his fingers up past the nightmare across the mons pubis, up the slope of her belly, rib by rib, under and along her breast, such a goddess, if only I were—a full stop, finally—up to the neck and squeeze tight—all over, natural as the flowing river, as falling snow— like falling asleep—
In the early morning, under a sky that trembles like the underside of a tongue, the deer are congregating at the casement window. Their enormous crowding eyes stare in at the scene, craning heads disembodied by the borders of the windowpane. Legs kick in place; fawns huddle closer still to their mothers. Something inside at once draws them in and repels them, like a key, perhaps, to a silent shimmering lock in the earth’s deep fathoms but what it is I can’t quite say.
Robin Slate lives in Philadelphia, PA with her partner and their two rabbits. She can be found on Instagram at @vulpes.extranea.