Kathryn Davis - Duplex

Nothing looked like what it was here. The stringweed and creeper covered everything, leaving behind only the general shapes of things, disquieting like the sheeted furniture in Victorian novels, and what appeared to be paths often turned out to be trails made by animals or an aboveground system of drains, so if you weren’t careful you would sprain your ankle in a rabbit hole or pitch into a cistern and drown. This is why parents warned their children to stay out of the place. Miss Vicks knew her way around though; she came here often. It was her intention to take her dog for a walk and be home before nightfall, which, following the equinox, came earlier every day.

As she picked her way along a paved path, the surface of which was crazed and bunched like a tablecloth and laced with weeds, she heard in the surrounding tangle of shrubbery a faint buzzing that she thought was being made by flies or bees — I think it’s often possible for a person to lie to herself while at the same time knowing perfectly well what’s going on. The robots’ language may have been so foreign as to sound otherworldly but the mechanism that produced the speech had a familiar quality, combining the clicking, jet-like noises of a magnetic resonance imaging machine with the disconcerting sound of one human’s voice issuing from another human’s port. The truth is, Miss Vicks overheard her name.

Marjorie, Marjorie — it was like a song played on a triangle. The wind began to blow and the air to grow suddenly cold as if a thin veil of pretense had been let fall, the illusion of light and heat withdrawn, all the planets swimming closer, drawing into their orbits the dark chill nothing of outer space. “Is this because the season’s changing?” she asked herself, “or is this the way the world really is, or is this my mood?” Her little dog, usually eager to plunge on ahead, had dug in his paws, and she had to tug hard at the leash to get him to move.

Since the last time Miss Vicks had been to the estate there seemed to have arisen a beautiful bed of high reeds in place of the bocce court, beyond which the pond lay diamond-sown and rippling in the late-afternoon wind. Often in the past she would rendezvous with the sorcerer on the island in the pond’s center, in the ruin modeled after a dead queen’s temple of love. She would row herself across the water in the rowboat he left waiting for her in the shallows, a small boat, its blue paint peeling and the cross thwart cracked down the middle. As for how he got there himself — she never gave any thought to that. He could fit his whole hand inside her, his long fingers cupped like he was about to pluck something out. Maybe he did, for certainly she felt less whole after he was done.

There was no waiting rowboat today, and the pond seemed bigger than usual. Something like a large cloud slid into the sky above Miss Vicks’s head and came to a halt. It was too early for the scows but sometimes you’d see an object up there you were supposed to ignore.

He had appeared without warning on her street the other night, driving too fast, interrupting the boys’ baseball game. Like a normal man he considered himself an excellent driver even though he never paid attention to what he was doing — he could have hit someone. Miss Vicks always paid attention; she paid attention to everything. She knew there hadn’t been any reeds here before, but now the bed seemed to be growing, spreading out on either side and the pond also to be getting bigger, more like a lake, its far shore no longer visible and its surface troubled by large gray-green foam-crested waves. Meanwhile the reeds seemed to be getting taller as she stood there, the long blackish pipes of their stems pushing up taller and taller around her, whistling in the wind, their feathery heads breaking apart in her face, releasing clouds of fluffy seeds that got into her eyes and ears and nostrils, and made it increasingly difficult for her to see or hear or breathe.

Her dog was whimpering now as he lay on the ground among the reeds, his soft red coat completely hidden under a shifting blanket of down. Coming to meet her lover Miss Vicks had often had this sense of thwarted will, like when a large insect flies mistakenly into a room through an open window and then keeps flying around and around, attracted to all the wrong things, mirrors or framed photographs, heat registers or — sadder still — a closed window, without ever realizing that all it needs to do is go out the window it came in through and it will be guaranteed a blue sky and a fresh breeze and the prospect of a life that won’t be cut short by the angry swat of a rolled newspaper.

“Get up!” she said. The sun was bright red and more ball-like than usual, falling into the place behind the reeds where there used to be a pond. She pushed the stems aside, furious. “Get up!” she said again, as upset by the way she was talking to her dog — her sweet little dog who never did anyone any harm — as she was by everything else. “What am I doing here?” Miss Vicks wondered aloud. “Whose life is this?”

All at once she could see the blue rowboat approaching across the wild gray-green water, its bow rising and falling in the swells.

At first she heard nothing but the plash of the oars, followed by voices, a boy’s and a girl’s.

“Then what?” the boy was saying. It was hard to hear his voice but Miss Vicks knew it was Eddie — she could barely make out his features in the gathering darkness, his white teeth and thick dark hair.

“Then you’re going to have to give it to him, like you promised,” the girl said. “Before he has to come after it him-self.” Fireflies were alighting in a row upon the yellow coil of her hair, after which they turned to diamonds.

“What if I change my mind?” Eddie asked.

“Don’t make jokes,” the girl replied. “I’ll be watching.”

“I’m not making a joke,” Eddie said.

Miss Vicks couldn’t hear the rest. Her dog started to bark and Eddie’s voice broke apart into static. Night had fallen; the girl made herself very small and flew into his pocket. A few stars were twinkling around the quarter moon.

I WISH THIS WAS A DIFFERENT STORY. THE VESSELS sailed and sailed and eventually they fell off the edge. You can have all the information in the world and what good does it do you? The edge of the world is a real place; when you have no soul there are no limits. There was a game everyone used to play at birthday parties called musical chairs. A parent would put a record on the record player and cheerful music would start up, disguising the fact that someone was about to be cast into the outer dark where the fairies live.

Eddie returned to school as if nothing had happened and Miss Vicks acted as if he had never been gone, withholding the favors she usually granted sick students like clapping the erasers or feeding the goldfish. She knew it wasn’t Eddie though, that the thing sitting in Eddie’s seat wasn’t the same Eddie who’d been sitting there before. She couldn’t take out a measuring tape and measure him but she felt sure he was bigger — bigger and less apprehensive and nowhere near as sweet. Down came the sailing vessels, up went the turkeys. The first-grade teacher married a man with legs made of wood. It was a mast year; a tremor ran through all the mothers. The wind blew. The clouds spread out and draped themselves across the face of the weather. A snowflake fell and then another and then many snowflakes. There was a holiday recital during which Cindy XA did twenty solo fouettés, passing wraithlike through matter like a neutrino.

The wind was a woe but not personal. Spiky black balls blew off the sycamores lining the street. Two of the “special” children sickened and died. At some point in high school Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; Eddie was very tall now and slicked his hair back with a comb he carried in a shirt pocket located in the same place as the one the girl with golden hair had flown into years earlier. There was never any question that he and Mary would become sweethearts, but things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.