A. Homes: The End of Alice

Harrods. Victoria and Albert. Madame Tussaud’s. She is on a red bus riding down High Street. Sweaters for Mom and Dad at Marks and Sparks. Westminster, the Bloody Tower, the Florence Nightingale Museum. She has been drinking Orange Squash for six days straight, morning, noon, and night. Orange Squash and Kit Kat bars. The changing of the guard.

Rome. The Teatro di Pompeo, Venice at the Serenis-sima, in Florence at the Morandi alia Crocetta. Everywhere she goes, she gives her camera to a strange man and asks him to photograph her, there, like that. At the II Campanile di Giotto, a girl she knows from school sees her. “Big world,” the girl says. “How funny. Last week I saw Sally Wilkens at the zoo in Prague.”

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In Portofino, she is at the Splendido, looking out over the sea.

I am with her, too, she carries me in her pocket, in her suitcase. She carries me wherever she goes.

In her hotel rooms she makes notes, she writes, but doesn’t mail the letters. It is a journal now, hers, hers alone, private, personal, I have no idea what she’s really thinking.

Once, she calls home once.

“I didn’t tell you this before, but your father accidentally opened one of those letters,” her mother says. “I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, I’m not sure I want to know. Your father and I are very concerned. When you get home, you’re going to have to talk to someone about this.”

Her heart stops for a minute, and then because she is young, because she is strong, it starts itself again.

“Let’s not dwell on it now,” her mother says. “We’ll deal with it when you get back.”

She doesn’t call again.

She borrows a car and drives. In a town in Tuscany, a madwoman runs down a street, grabs the girl, and kisses her. “A kiss is a kiss,” the woman says in English.

The girl is tired. Sometimes she just stays in the hotel. The thought of going out, of figuring out where she is, where she wants to go, is exhausting. Sometimes she is perfectly content to sit in the room and look out the window.

In the hotel in Paris, a blind man sits in the lobby with a dog. She befriends the dog. One night, she leads the man and his dog up to her room. When the girl brings the man to her bed, the dog grows excited and jumps up, joining them. “Couche, ” the man orders the hound. “Couche, ” he says, and the dog waits for his master on the floor.

It is August. Paris is on vacation. She rides the boat on the Bateaux Mouches, shops for school clothes in the St. Germain, eats bouillabaisse, escargots, and blood sausages. Walking the Rue de Rivoli, Tuileries, the Bois de Boulogne, she is always moving, in motion. She has the quality of seeming to know where she is going. People come to her and ask directions. Oddly, she is able to tell them where to go. She makes gestures and draws diagrams. She has no language.

There are no more letters. There is nothing to say.

She is at the airport now. She is coming home.

P. S. I’m not afraid of you anymore, I’m more afraid of myself.

Prison. Bells. Morning. The names are called; attendance is taken.

“You have to eat a peck of dirt before you die,” the sergeant says, checking on grazier, who was returned to his cell late last night.

“My Hohner is gone,” Frazier says, his voice raspy and weak. “My Hohner is gone.” Apparently in the effort to remove his harmonica from his larynx, the instrument was destroyed.

“It’s not so easy to kill yourself,” the sergeant says. “The body resists.”

Sometimes.

The sergeant is at my door. I hear no jingling keys. “There’s a continuation,” he says. “It won’t be long. Get dressed. Get ready.”

Round two.

Again breakfast doesn’t come. Budget cuts?

My pants are fitting better now that I’ve lost a few pounds.

Henry arrives on his morning rounds.

“Thank you for last night. It was lovely. Just what I needed. In due time your good works will be rewarded.”

“I hope so. You’re running up a real tab.”

“What exactly is in your mix?” I ask the recipe only to distract him from the subject of my bill.

“A bit of this and that,” he says, tapping his needle against my door.

Again, I’ve been locked in, a box within a box, how degrading. Where do they think I’d go?

I mount my mouth against the hole. There is a dull pain in my jaw and all down my neck. My left side in general seems not to be working well. I slump to the floor and arrange to have Henry shoot me on the right.

“Can you do it?” I ask.

“I am a magician, a sorcerer, I can do anything.”

The needle is in. I am out. Henry is gone.

Pounding, pounding, just like yesterday, there’s a pounding at tne door.

“Is that you?” I ask.

Guards: cuffs, shackles, belly chain. Again I am on parade, led limping through the corridors, my left leg dragging languid, lazy behind me.

“Sorry I’m so slow,” I say, apologizing for my sluggishness. My speech is slurred.

The day has a certain clarity, an absence of aggravation, of anxiety.

A clock on the wall of the committee room reads ten of ten. I sit. The members of the committee file in, get their coffee orders straight. For some reason I’m surprised to see the same three people again today. I don’t know why, but I imagined that each time it was different.

“Are you feeling well?” the black woman asks.

“Better,” I say.

“Did you sleep last night?” the white-haired lady adds.

“Did you sleep well?” Mama says. “Dream a pleasant dream?”

I smile. Fumes escape my mouth. I didn’t brush my teeth. I run my tongue over my incisors and bicuspids. They have the texture of moss, the flavor of mold, of fungus run amok. In fact, I don’t remember when I last brushed my teeth. I don’t remember ever having a toothbrush in this place.

“Yesterday, we were reviewing the events.”

“And then you lost it,” the old woman says, as if she’s required to remind me.

“We need to discuss the options,” the man says, speaking softly. And then I think I hear him say medication, castration, and I mean to ask if that’s really in their repertoire, but a flash of internal lightning, a pain, divides my chest.

“Tell us about Alice,” the black woman asks.

“What more can I say?”

“How did you feel about her?”

“Fond. Very fond.”

“In a letter to the court, her family claims you tried to kill her, to drown her in the lake,” the little old lady says— and I hate her.

“I saved her.”

The lake, the boat, why do you make me repeat myself?

I bring her home, give her back. Breathless when I reach the porch, I kick at the back door, until finally Gwendolyn, in curlers, answers.

“The boat, the lake, her head banged.”

“Mother,” Gwendolyn bleats. “Mother, come quick.”

I lay little Alice across the backseat of their car.

Gwen raises the edge of the tablecloth and covers Alice’s exposed breast. “She looks too old to be skinny-dipping.”

“I’ve brought her back,” I say as the mother comes running out. She looks at her daughter and flies fast into the front seat.

I could have taken her home, kept her for myself, but I brought her back — is that what she would have wanted?

“She banged her head on the bottom of the boat.”

“Damned lake,” the mother says, turning the ignition. The engine grinds, is slow to turn over. “Damn it to hell.” Gwendolyn pulls the car door closed. I am out on the side of the road. The car backs away.

Alone at night, I don’t sleep at all. I lie on her side of the bed, my head against the pillow where she usually rests. I turn my face into the pillow and breathe the scent of a little girl who bathes infrequently, sweet dirty sweat. Still hooked to the bed frame are strands of her hair; I take them into my mouth, sucking them. What to do? What to do?