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She came to in the kitchen and found the oven on. She didn’t remember igniting it, but then, she couldn’t seem to remember rising from bed that morning at all, not dressing, nor plodding—barefooted, she saw now—down the hall from the bedroom. This was not a shock. For months she’d been losing time. Losing time, she’d say, as if time were an object, a set of keys, say, or a passport, a thing one held and could, in turn, misplace, though it felt rather that time had lost her, had slipped its noose somehow and fled somewhere she could no longer see.
Her head was wooly; her limbs stiff. She stooped to peer through the oven door, carefully dodging her reflection in the glass. Empty. How queer.
Edie? she shouted.
Maybe her roommate had set it going and forgotten. Edie often rushed things—always late, but an otherwise sensible woman, generous and warm. Despite being born and raised in Boston, Edie had faith that the world arced toward goodness. The women had been up late the night before, drinking and cleaning and gossiping, but Edie was on a self-improvement kick this month, some October challenge she’d joined in solidarity with her colleagues at the museum, amiable divorcées all thirty years older than she was. Better, she’d said, to improve the mess now—more to work with at my age. Pliable flesh. She’d winked.
She’d have left for the gym an hour ago. Anyhow, the apartment had that eerie, unpeopled feeling. The air was humming to itself.
Jamie blinked against the sun where it crept through the window. It lay a shroud over the table. Outside an oak shuddered, casting shade, causing the light, where it landed, to thicken and attenuate; to converge and again disengage. Like a shadow play, she thought, except she couldn’t see any story in it. Something about this horrified her immensely.
She’d had the dream again. The grinning mouth, that shadowy stoop, a place of force. Its outline was clear but the specifics impossible to situate. It was just a haze of violence: odorous, goopy, exhausting. When she’d sat up it was three a.m.—it seemed always to be three a.m.—and the sheets were damp, her skin slick with night grease. The light was left on. The room had a weight to it, a fullness. She knew what she would find.
Floating there in the corner, that enigmatical nebula of atoms: the presence she’d come to call the Specter. A ghost, maybe, or just a hallucination. At any rate, it arrived in her life when the dream had, after that awful night in June, the one that had been thieved from her memory. For a time the Specter only appeared to her in the wake of the bad dream, as if part of the plot somehow, like it came from the same world.
But then it began to split apart, and she’d find it coagulating at the foot of the stairs in the middle of the day, a home invader, seeming now to move through her life at its leisure. A drifter. Autonomous. Unpredictable.
Turning her face from it, she shut off the light. She didn’t like to look at the Specter in darkness—it was more threatening then. She’d lain still, breathing shallowly, and listened to her heart thud against the lockbox of her chest. At night, yes, she was unable to deal with it, the Specter’s inscrutable watchfulness, so she closed her eyes and waited, and waited, and waited. And then drifted, after what seemed a long while, into sleep once more.
Now the day entered her, and the vision dissolved. She felt only a tenseness, a kind of a vague, wiry condition. She stretched her arms up and yowled, feeling she hadn’t slept at all.
Where the sun warmed the table she lay a palm on the wood and dragged her flesh against the grain—seeking friction, thinking to snag the thread of the dream and unspool it, scry its meaning, and so trace a path out from the center of the labyrinth to where— Her alarm shrieked, splitting her. She slammed a hand on the phone. Now a throb stirred behind her temples.
Vacant there before the stove, she was a girl in a fairy story, perhaps her favorite, the one about the sleeping beauty. As a child she’d watched the movie dozens of times, rewinding and replaying it so often the tape wore out, spitting its reels at her in tragic, weary ribbons. She’d loved the fairies and their trilling voices, as all little girls did, and admired the princess’s forested solitude, the way she seemed always to be embraced by trees and smiling woodland creatures.
But what transfixed Jamie above all else was the scene where the princess wandered like a zombie through the castle toward fate—the hidden spindle, deadly and expectant. How beautiful she looked, and how fragile—Jamie had dreamed of one day brandishing that liquid mix of grace and delicacy, she longed to have such sexless breasts, the thick cascade of golden hair. And she had hated the wicked fairy, who set such horrors in motion, and for what—jealousy over a baby?
It didn’t seem fair death had come to call on the princess. Through no fault of her own, she’d had, then, to answer, walking straight at it, her gaze cavernous. Her death was reversible, sure, undone by true love’s kiss, but even as a girl it was funny to Jamie how you always needed a man to dig you out of the hole of other women’s envy, and no one ever seeing it was a man’s fault there was any envy there to begin with.
Still, she couldn’t stay mad at the prince; he was so handsome, and when he waltzed with the princess between the clouds—her gown flitting between shades of pale blue and rose—Jamie thought the place they’d ended up must be heaven, and wondered, if it was heaven, where God stood in the scene, why he’d brought them up there so early, only to remain out of frame. But then she thought how maybe God was really just a room made of clouds, accumulating there beneath you, around you, and all above your head. Maybe what God was was a soft holding cell. And what waited for you in the ever after, that heaven, was just a dull sense of weightlessness.
The stove clock glared at her: 7:30, then. A defenseless hour. The sun pulsed and climbed its blank ladder. The sky was glorious: a clean, uninterruptible blue. She cracked the window to air the room. A rush of cold. No more, the summer stench of city garbage; no cacophony of honks or shouts from the street below, or not yet. Autumn had arrived in the night. Here, now, its disintegrations. Already the leaves of the neighbor’s maple were deepening and shifting in tone, Pilgrim colors: pumpkin and chestnut, shy goldenrod. Coronas of rouge at the leaves’ centers pouted. Bruised mouths.
This, then, Boston’s lone pleasure, its fall splendor. Though soon it would be winter. The gray threat loomed. And then a diminishment would set in, a hibernation, and her delight in clamming shut against the world would be followed by the long boredom, that half year of night, the city an underworld, cloaked and cramped in snow, in silence. Everyone miserable, and her thick depression. The sky birdless. The oxygen sucked from each room.
What was it she’d been doing.
She turned the oven off.
On her ring finger she noticed, now, the sliver of a hangnail. She suppressed an urge to suck and chew at its omen of disorder. Lately she’d been battling this habit, for she could squander whole afternoons picking absently at the wounds of her cuticles, the soft skin on the ends of her fingers. This occupied her while she read or graded papers, scrolled Facebook or stared emptily through the window of the bus, the subway car, the commuter train. What remained in the aftermath of her gnashing was a chaos of serrated flesh. Inkblots of blood would appear on her clothes: evidence she’d gone too deep. When she saw others see the fallout of her demolitions, shame, that boiling mud, spread through her, but she couldn’t stop. Half her fingers were wrapped in Band-Aids.
What sort of a man wants to hold hands with that. An old voice nagged.
But he’d been right. None did.
Mainly she stuffed her hands in her pockets, and lately she indulged her sickness only when alone, in the convent of her room. Finally, though, she’d decided to change. This couldn’t go on—the nail biting, the drinking, the way her mind seemed to be, well, how else to put it, dispersing. I will no longer steward my havoc without objection! This she’d said in the bathroom mirror, forcing herself to face her face. An unfamiliar wraith. She thought her formulation quite lyrical—havoc, stewarding—and felt certain casting her decision as an epic journey might propel her toward real renewal. She’d transform herself, she’d said (and we must admit it, said while stinking fucking drunk), into a consummate disciplinarian, would become, as it were, her own impossibly cruel mistress.
Painfully she’d lifted her lips: a grimace in the skin of a smile.
She’d begin with the biting. She’d thought, at first, mantras would rewire her circuitry through repetition alone. Vision boards, manifestation rituals—she’d read The Secret. An astrologer she bartered with on Boylston for a ten-minute reading told her she was in an era of molting, but she would find she was her own best teacher. She was only in need of guardrails, a language with which to make meaning from nothingness. Still, she’d found that speech was not action, and then polish hadn’t worked, nor had clipping her nails to the quick. Not even—by god, she’d tried it as a last resort—coating her fingers in the spray her mother used to keep their dogs from chewing the furniture. After a week, or perhaps two, Jamie began to enjoy its bitter flavor, and would pucker pleasurably at the chemical sting, its strange sobering effect.
