Alexandra Kleeman - Intimations - Stories

I looked at it. It was a decent-size baby. It didn’t look like a newborn. It didn’t look like a toddler. I couldn’t tell if it looked like me. I suppose we looked similar insofar as we were both humans, with eyes and noses in the right places. But at this stage, it was too difficult to say whether we resembled each other.

Why don’t you hold it? he said. He levered it off into my arms.

I don’t know, I said.

Just then it began to wail, and he handed me a little spoon full of mush.

Somehow I knew that if I put this food into the mouth of the baby, I would never be allowed to leave this house. But if I didn’t put the food into the baby, who would? He wouldn’t do it, and the baby was unlikely to feed itself until it was at least a week or so older. My best hope was to wait around, try to figure out how things happened here, and learn how to make time pass faster and faster until it was grown up and ready to leave. Then maybe I could sneak out through the hole it made as it escaped.

Say something to it, he said.

As I looked at the baby, I felt nothing taking shape in mind or mouth. I had no idea what the sort of things were that somebody would say to a baby. I had no idea why anyone would say anything to a baby. I held it carefully, as one would a sack of apples. And then, with him watching me, nodding encouragingly, I began to say to it, for lack of anything else to say, all the words I had ever known, in order.

It was some sort of banquet hall or ballroom, windowless and arrayed with candles, and containing thirty or forty people who turned toward me, staring. They stared at me as though they hoped they could fix me through staring, or at least stare me away. I felt a stickiness move across my skin, and because I could not shut their eyes, I shut my own.

When I opened them, I was still standing in a large room with many other people. Nothing in the situation had changed or would change, however much I wished for it, and that seemed unbearable in a way that I supposed I would be bearing anyhow. There were small, delicate cakes and little heaps of berries. There were balloons floating up against the ceiling and wilting on the ground, colored shapes lying still in the dim and festive light.

I had arrived in costume, but it was not a costume party. Just a normal party, they said.

I looked down at my body as if for the first time. It seemed impossible to get an accurate view of myself without a mirror or camera, something on the outside to look in. From the perspective of my eyes, my shoulders and torso were huge. My legs began in knees, short and stubby, then suddenly there were shoes and it was all done. I was dressed entirely in white: a short white vinyl dress and white stockings; short white gloves and white heels. I had on a hat with a red cross at the front, and I was covered in fake blood.

I had come dressed as a sexy nurse: the blood was mostly incidental, mostly a way to keep from getting mixed up with the other sexy nurses that inevitably turn up at costume parties. But this was a normal party, and as such the blood was now a real liability. It was perhaps the one factor that made it truly unimaginable for me to blend in with the elegant people that fluttered around nearby, laughing lightly and staring at me like I was covered in blood, which I was.

“Is there someplace I could stow my coat?” I asked.

The thing was to behave as normally as possible, more normally than was possible, in order to balance out the blood. All the attention in the room was pooling at my feet, and I needed something big and alarming to draw it away from me, or conversely, something very ordinary to mask it. I went over to the table to find something to hold in my hands. Empty plastic cups measured out the emptiness in neat rows, waiting to be filled or moved or restacked. These objects were pieces, building up toward a whole I could not at all recognize.

“A little bit of detergent and ammonia, that’s what I would use,” said a woman’s voice from behind me, whispered harshly. It appeared some people were having trouble telling the fake blood from real, and this might account for the coagulation of fear in the space surrounding me. I mixed alcohol, juice, and ice until it approximated the right color, and then I tried to figure out a way to stand. The light was strange in there, and it seemed conceivable that I could find a place and position that would render the bloodstains invisible, camouflaged, like a dappled shadow falling on the surface of grass.

But my movements in and out of the shadowy areas of the room, covered in blood as I was, made the other partygoers nervous. My dress gave off a loud and plasticky sound when I shifted even slightly, and there was the tendency of my costume toward drippage. The other guests hunched in toward one another as I wriggled in the corners, trying to cancel out the stains. “You just can’t hide something like that,” a man’s voice said with audible disgust, coming from someplace I was unable to see.

The way things were, all I could do was make the situation worse.

There are times when any amount of being within the world is like rubbing bare skin against sandpaper, when any form of motion is a kind of abrasion, leaving you raw and pink and vulnerable to the next thing. At these times, I prefer to close my eyes and be still, still like the cups or candles or crackers on the table, nerveless and open. I closed my eyes and tried to think of the thing furthest from my situation. I imagined a meadow and I populated it with sunlight, a small and rustic fence trailing toward the horizon, a little family of ducks and a couple of grazing sheep, a green and verdant field studded with small white flowers, possibly clover blossoms. But before I knew it, blood was everywhere, though the sheep continued to munch along idyllically, tearing at the reddened tufts with small, calm movements and very white teeth.

When I opened my eyes, a man was standing next to me, watching me with curiosity, mostly. There was a shyness to his staring that I found bearable, if only in contrast to the other forms of staring that were going on around and at me. “Hello,” he said. “Hi,” I responded. “My name’s Andrew,” he said.

I nodded. Where was all this going?

“Well, I wanted to tell you first off that your fake blood looks great. Really realistic. Really scary, you know? But without being actually too scary. Really great.”

I was flattered by his eye for detail: in fact I had spent a good amount of time getting the blood right, perfecting the proportions and cooking times as I made it from scratch. My recipe was a variant on the classic Karo syrup and red food coloring used in horror movies from the 1980s. Six pints of Karo syrup at room temperature, three ounces of red food coloring, nondairy creamer for opacity, arrowroot powder for texture, blue food coloring for depth, a bit of honey for the complexion, and vanilla extract to improve the scent. As with real blood, every element of the fake served a vital purpose.

It looked like Andrew had something else he wanted to say.

“Well, I don’t mean to bother you. I guess I just noticed you standing by yourself and I just was wondering. I mean, you don’t have to answer. But I was wondering. Are you part of the murder mystery, too?”

“Murder mystery?” I asked.

“Yeah, the one in the other room. In the kitchen or whatever. The guy with the ax in him.”

“I’m not part of any murder mystery,” I explained. “I just made a mistake.”

A woman’s voice came from my right. “Murder mystery?” it said. “Oh, how fun!”

I turned and looked at her.

“Well,” she said, directing herself toward Andrew and avoiding my glare, “let’s have a look! It’s about time something interesting happened here.”