Aimee Bender - Willful Creatures

The gas room was empty.

“Oh,” I said, “hmm.” I worried for a second that she’d been robbed and was just now finding out.

“Be very very careful,” she whispered then. “This is expensive.” She looked tense beneath her tan, each of her features tight in its place.

“More expensive than PEARL?” I said.

“Much more,” she said. “This takes very difficult concentration. This is my most challenging work. Look here,” she said, “come here and look.”

She walked over to one of the shelves on the wall and close up I could see there was more glass tubing-not much, but one word’s worth. It spelled SMOKE. Soft granules of ash floated through the M.

“It’s a good one,” I said. “I like it.”

“Most of them,” she said, still whispering, “in this room, don’t have the tubing.”

“Oh.” I bobbed my head, not understanding.

“See,” she continued, “there are many many gas words in this room but you might not be able to read them.”

I looked to the shelves and saw nothing, saw shelves that were empty, saw how my apartment would look in a month when Steve had cleared out his books and his bookends.

“Top shelf: XENON,” the woman said. “It’s there, it’s just very hard to see. I can see it because I have very good eyes for it, because it is my medium.”

I looked to the top shelf. “There’s no XENON there,” I said. “There’s nothing.”

“Trust me,” she said. “There’s XENON.”

I shook my head. I shifted my feet a few times. There was POISON in the room before, dark and available, and a thin wire of fear started to cut and coil in my stomach.

“ARGON,” she said, “is on shelf four, below XENON.”

“Noble gas number two,” I said.

She nodded. “I prefer the noble gases.”

“I bet,” I said. “There’s no ARGON there,” I said.

“It’s there,” she said. “Be extremely careful.”

I spoke slowly, coated now in a very mild shellac of panic. “How,” I said, “how can it be there, it would dissipate. I took chemistry. It can’t just sit there. Argon,” I said, “can’t just sit there.”

“I put guidelines in the air,” she said.

“I make a formation in the air.”

I turned toward the entrance.

“I think it’s time for me to go,” I said.

“NEON,” she said, “is on shelf number three.”

But right before I walked to the door, I reached out a hand which was so hard and gluey from the mango juice, reached out just to wipe it slightly on the very tip of the shelf. The coil in my stomach took my fingers there. I barely even noticed what I was doing.

The woman drew in her breath in agony.

“Aaghh!” she choked as I got in my little wipe wipe. “You broke it!”

“I broke what?” I said. “Broke what?”

“You broke AIR,” she said. “You need to pay for it, you broke it, you broke AIR.”

Then she pointed to a sign I hadn’t seen before, tucked half behind a shelf, a half-hidden laminated sign that said: VISITORS MUST PAY FOR BROKEN MERCHANDISE.

“There’s air there still,” I said, “that’s no special air.”

“It was air in the shape of AIR,” she said. “It took me a while to train that space, it was AIR. That’s three hundred dollars.”

“What?” I said. “I won’t pay that,” I said, speaking louder. “I didn’t even break it, look, there’s tons of air around, there’s air everywhere.”

I waved my hand in the space, indicating air, and she let out another, louder, shriek.

“That was HOPE,” she said, “you just broke HOPE!”

“HOPE?” I said, and now I went straight to the glass door, “Broke hope? Hope is not a gas, you can’t form hope!”

The door, thank God, was unlocked, and I swung it open and stalked into the liquid room. The woman was right on my heels.

“I caught hope,” she said. “I made it into a gas.”

“I want to go now,” I said. “There’s no possible way to catch hope, please.”

My voice was gaining height. I didn’t believe her but still. Of all things to wreck.

“Well,” she said. “I went to wedding after wedding after wedding in Las Vegas. And I capped the bottle each time right when they said ‘I do.’”

This made me laugh for a second but then I had to stop because I thought I might choke. I could just see those couples now, perched at opposite ends of a living-room couch, book-ending the air between them, the thickest, most formed air around, that uncrossable, unbreakable, impossible air, finally signing the papers that would send them to different addresses.

I thought of the seven years I’d spent with Steve, and how at first when we’d kissed his lips had been a boat made of roses and how now they were a freight train of lead.

So that I wouldn’t cry, I put my hand near my face and made a pushing motion, moved some wind toward her. “I’m Queen of Hope,” I said. “Here. Have some of mine.”

She grabbed BLOOD from the liquid room shelves.

“Give me my money for AIR!” she said, waving the BLOOD in my face.

I opened the door to the solid room and ran through it. I kept my back arched so she wouldn’t touch me. I couldn’t pay the money and I wouldn’t pay it, it was air, for God’s sake, but I didn’t want that blood on me, didn’t want that blood anywhere close to me.

“I’m sorry,” I yelled as I edged out the front, “sorry!”

I looked past the fruit to locate my car and as I did, my eye grazed over the solid words, familiar now, but on the bottom shelf I suddenly saw CAT and DOG in big brown capitals which I hadn’t seen before and my stomach balked. The woman kept yelling “You Owe Me Money!” and I hit the dead warmth of the outside air.

Everything was still. My car sat across the street, waiting for me, placid.

The woman was right behind me, yelling, “You owe me three hundred dollars!” and I took NUT out of my bag and threw it behind me where it broke on the street into a million shavings. “Nut!” I yelled. I got into my car, key shaking.

“Vandal!” she yelled back, and she didn’t even try to cross the street but just stood at the front of the blue-awninged store with BLOOD in her arms and then she reached back and pelted my car with a tangelo and a pineapple and one huge hard cantaloupe. I locked my doors and right when I put my key into the ignition, she took BLOOD and threw that too; it hit the car square on the passenger-side window, cracking on the top and opening up like an egg, dripping red down the window until the letters ran clear. Maybe it was just juice, but that one I trusted, that one seemed real to me.

Hands trembling, I put my foot on the accelerator and the car started quickly, warmed from the sunlight, the desert spreading out hot and fruitless. The window to my right was streaking with red now. I kept a hand on the car lock, making sure it was down. Across the street, the woman pulled back her arm, which was an awfully good arm, by the way, she was some kind of baseball superstar, and she let fly a few guavas, which splatted blue against my rear window.

I drove away fast as I could. The shack and the woman, still throwing, grew small in my rearview mirror. I drove and drove for eighty miles without pausing, just getting away, just speeding away as the blood dried on the window, away from the piles of tangerines, from the star fruit clumped in stolen constellations, from the seven different mutations of apple.

In an hour I desperately needed to go to the bathroom, so I pulled into a gas station. I still had the brown bag of mangoes with me. When I opened it up, they were all black and rotten, with flies crawling over them. I dumped the whole bag. The one I’d eaten was just a pit, which I removed from my purse and kept on the passenger seat, but by the time I got home and pulled into the empty driveway, it too had rotted away into a soft, weak ball.