The Unfinished World Read online

  For Isadora

  May you grow into every hero, defeat every villain, and show kindness to every misunderstood monster.

  Contents

  The Janitor in Space

  The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies

  The Cemetery for Lost Faces

  The Logic of the Loaded Heart

  Thirteen Ways of Destroying a Painting

  Lancelot in the Lost Places of the World

  And the World Was Crowded with Things That Meant Love

  Birds with Teeth

  For These Humans Who Cannot Fly

  Take Your Daughter to the Slaughter

  We Were Holy Once

  La Belle de Nuit, La Belle de Jour

  The Men and Women Like Him

  Things You Should Know About Cassandra Dee

  The Fires of Western Heaven

  The Process of Human Decay

  The Fever Librarian

  The Unfinished World

  The Sleepers

  Acknowledgments

  Come, my friends,

  ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.

  Push off, and sitting well in order smite

  The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:

  It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.

  Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

  We are not now that strength which in old days

  Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

  One equal temper of heroic hearts,

  Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

  To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

  —ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON, FROM “ULYSSES”

  A man is a god in ruins.

  —RALPH WALDO EMERSON

  the

  unfinished

  world

  The Janitor in Space

  The janitor makes her way through the corridor with purpose, suctioning space dust and human debris from crevices of the space station. She is good at her job. She can push off from the walls in a steady trajectory without even looking; her eyes are always on the windows and the impossibly bright stars beyond.

  The astronauts are good, but unclean, thinks the space janitor. Like the astronaut who left liquid salt floating in little globs all over the kitchen today. Like the lady astronauts who leave bloody tampons unsecured and spill bits of powder into the air. Like the male astronauts who leave their dirty underwear drifting around their cabin modules, their worn-through tube socks smelling of cheese and old syrup. And the dead skin flakes—so many flakes she wonders how any skin could be left to wrap all that muscle and bone. Of course she rarely sees the astronauts, so while she assumes they still have skin, it is possible they have shed their skin entirely, that they have, like strange insects, exchanged their soft outside layers for hard, black, shining exoskeletons instead.

  She almost never sees anyone except the night watchman, an elderly mute who spends most of the night watching porn in the security office. She never complains about his unsavory habits, though. She wouldn’t even know who to complain to. She supposes the astronauts watch porn, anyway. Or maybe not; good people don’t watch such things, she remembers from her time on Earth.

  The janitor knows that being good is not the same as being clean. She, for instance, is very clean, but she is not very good. She is still traveling on her way toward that. She told her pastor that she was coming up here to be closer to God, but really she just wanted to get away from Earth. She was tired of waiting to be recognized, waiting for someone to hear her name and turn, eyes too big, full of questions and dangerous curiosity.

  People will think you’re prideful, wanting to go up in space, her only friend had said. He worked in the state-owned liquor store where she bought a case of Miller Lite every Tuesday morning, after her shift at the hospital ended. She always worked nights; fewer waking bodies around, less human chaos. She never much liked talking, and after the close crowds of the jail, she liked to be far from the hum and buzz.

  The space station staff liked her when they interviewed her—she seemed polite and quiet and incurious. That was important. One of the astronauts, a bearded Russian with kind eyes, asked her a question: Will you be lonely in space? She looked at the faint lines scrawled around his eyes and forehead, and she supposed he had a family somewhere, maybe small children. Yes, she said, but I have always been lonely. The astronaut nodded, and she could see he understood. She could see his aquiline profile as he turned to someone offscreen, and she knew she would get the job.

  The astronauts occasionally get up during the night, and then the janitor tries to be a shadow, a gray bird. She ducks out of sight, floats to the ceiling in rooms where they wander, terrified they will appear different during the artificial night of space; sure she, too, will be different. Sure that starlight will strip away the years, will fall upon a thirteen-year-old girl alone on a dirt road, a bruise on her face and the mop clenched painfully in her broken fist. The things, the nightmare things fear could claim you for. The dark hurts in the veins, the heart-deep hurts in the buried parts of the body. The faces that chase her, even now, even in the farthest fields of space where nothing grows, nothing whispers, nothing lives or dies but the first things that ever got made in the universe. She isn’t sure whether she believes in God or not, though she always told her pastor she did. She isn’t sure any woman ought to believe in God.

  In lockup, most of the women didn’t. They said the name of God and the name of certain men and spat, teeth pressed together in a kind of crooked, inward anger. She learned to push a mop and broom in prison, learned to be useful. It was a good thing to be of some use in this world. Or, she revised, in this universe. It was hard sometimes, to get used to this new way of thinking, to bobbling round the Earth like a second moon. She felt free, free of all the accumulated debris of a lifetime in sin and sacrifice, free of the burden of people for the first time in her whole flat life. She felt small and bright and diamond-hard, a little star in the firmament.

  The light was so bright here, always, despite the darkness of the spaces in between. The fluorescents scattered throughout the station, the milky white light of the nebulae. The twinkling reds and greens and yellows of the instrument panels. The soft blue glow of the Earth over her shoulder. It was comforting, like a street on Earth at Christmastime: a sleepy rainbow glow over these travelers straying so far from home.

  Light of my life, he sang to her while he had her on his knee. She was just a baby, broad-faced and raw. And if nobody ever loved you, it was easy for somebody to tell you such pretty things. It was easy for you to sit by while they did such unpretty things. She suctions up drops of urine and thinks about how it felt to hold a gun, how that boy and girl never even looked at her face while she held it. She dropped it like a snake; it felt like a dishonest thing, something so solid but, really, a dirty hollow pair of barrels. He laughed at her and picked it up, like he was made to hold it. His hands slid all over that steel and wood just like they did all over her.

  She scrubs the fingerprints from the instrument panels, watches the lights flicker and dim. She wonders how many rags she’ll go through, how many surfaces have to get clean before she can finally empty herself of the past. She doesn’t know about metaphors but she knows that even the smallest human vessel has boundless storage for sorrow. Was there a right way to take in so much sorrow it burned clean through the lungs and heart? Was there a right way to atone?

  There is, she thinks, a kind of atonement in hard, honest work. And so each night
she suctions, sweeps, mops, waxes, shakes out rugs, cleans and stocks the bathrooms, launders and changes the bedding, collects and disposes of trash, replaces lights, polishes the smooth metal, and washes the walls and ceilings. She cleans lint, dust, oil, and grease from their machines, cleans the glassware and lab equipment, soaps down sinks and sterilizes microscopes. She refills and labels tubes and bottles in her careful, neat handwriting. She keeps the station clean and shiny as the future.

  She feels at home beyond the skies. She lied and said she came here to be close to God, but she feels further away from Him than ever. God was everywhere in the fields and farms of her childhood; God was on everybody’s lips and in their books and on their walls. God was the fire and the twisted face and the crippled-up preacher. God rose from the steam off the fields, crystallized in the oil puddles at the service station, was the cold stones in the neighbor’s pond after his boy died of polio. God was the iron lung around those family farms, squeezing, squeezing, and everybody dying inside.

  She feels happiest near the deep green shadows pooled in the corners of the station, listening to the low hum against the endless silence of the stars. This feels safer than God. It feels honest. It feels removed from any human notion of heaven.

  One night, she is scrubbing at a smudge on a window when the bearded Russian comes floating around the corner, pajama bottoms trailing and sleep-crusted eyes nearly shut. She pushes up, clings to the ceiling, breath held. But the Russian doesn’t even look her way; he glides past her to the wide wall of windows and puts his face to the glass like a child. Gde vy, he murmurs, and she doesn’t know what the words mean, but she understands. The pastor once said death was the gift of a wise god—and she wondered whether he really believed that. To her death seems the opposite of wisdom, the opposite of mystery, the opposite of being out here in this vast wondrous place. Death is the opposite of lonely, and lonely is the only thing the janitor owns. It is the only thing that’s hers. And that makes loneliness beautiful, out here among the cold and bright beginnings.

  The Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies

  One month before the jazz babies were born, their father sacrificed himself on the altar of the god Mammon; that is to say, he finally overworked himself into a heart attack in the accounting offices of the J&J Department Stores Incorporated. The jazz babies’ mother never liked to talk about it. Mention of the incident gave her a tremendous attack of nerves, accompanied by a terrific headache. Ever since the father’s death (and probably before), she had become the sort of person who avoided telephone calls and rung doorbells in case they preceded bad news.

  One day before the jazz babies were born, Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes was dancing the premiere performance of The Rite of Spring at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. This was across the Atlantic, it’s true, but the babies’ mother swore the ripples from the cataclysmic concert rocketed her into early labor and doomed her twins to a life of aggressively modern behavior and a love of dangerous music.

  One hour before the jazz babies were born, Al Jolson was recording “You Made Me Love You,” for wax cylinder, a song the twins’ mother would sing to them often in the next year, while dreaming of the menswear salesman with whom she went dancing on Saturdays (after a respectable period of mourning). Fifteen years later, the jazz babies (so-called, self-named) are over the moon about Al Jolson tying the knot with Ruby Keeler. The twins have a dance act, and both hope they look like Ruby while soft-shoeing it on the front porch of their mother’s and the menswear salesman’s new bungalow.

  The twins are blond with big heads, skinny bodies dangling below like strings under balloons. They are that mysterious age, not nymphets but not quite children; the age when awkward figures leave open the question of what they will develop into in a few short years. They lack grace but have a kind of buoyancy. It worries their mother, as does everything else under the sun, from animal attacks to the Oriental influence to modern bathing costumes.

  It has been in all the papers, the menswear salesman tells the mother. Grown women wearing bathing costumes in the middle of the park, the palazzo, the promenade; gathering en masse in bathing costumes and eating pizza. Lips smacking, thighs jiggling, arm fat flapping—the salesman shudders and stops, unable to go on. The jazz babies’ mother does not own a bathing suit, and in church the next Sunday she prays, in her nervous, insincere way, for the souls of the sinners that do. She also prays for her first husband in heaven, for the neighbors’ yappy dog to drop dead, and for a new wireless set.

  The jazz babies’ parents forbid them to continue their dancing on the porch. Once it was adorable, a sweet novelty to watch the two little girls, indistinguishable but for a small splotch of birthmark on the left heel of the eldest twin, hoofing it to the sounds of Hoagy Carmichael, Fats Waller, and Jelly Roll Morton. Their big finish had always been “Hard-Hearted Hannah (The Vamp of Savannah),” though the only reason they got away with it was that their mother, unfamiliar with Theda Bara, thought the lyrics were about chastity.

  Now, however, they are attracting a different kind of crowd: leering men, drawn to the gangly girls’ early puberty and no longer quite innocent hip flares and flashes of skin. They went from the Charleston to the Black Bottom to the Lindy Hop—this last one, with its obscene shimmies and twists, giving their mother and the menswear salesman fits. Now when they shake what god gave them while Dolly Kay belts out “She’s a gal who loves to see men suffer,” the whole scene takes on a distinctly unwholesome tone. Grown men begin hanging around the bungalow after dark, watching the girls catch fireflies. They follow the girls to school, offer to carry their books, make marriage proposals behind hedges. It is as if these men—most of them well past forty and fathers themselves—can sense a sort of dormant, smoldering sexuality and want to be first on the scene when it bursts into full bloom. After the babies’ mother catches two men climbing through the bathroom window to wait for the inevitable, she quickly and hysterically puts a stop to the whole thing.

  No more Lindy Hop, no more jazz, she tells them. No more vulgar public displays. If you want to dance you can take ballet lessons like every other nice little girl.

  We’re not nice little girls, says jazz baby number one. Her name is Patience, but everyone calls her Patty. She’s the twin with the birthmark, just a minute older than her sibling.

  That’s right, Mother, says jazz baby number two. Her name is Charity, but everybody calls her Cat. She, born second, always agrees with her elder sibling. We aren’t nice and we aren’t little girls, either.

  I don’t care what you are, says the menswear salesman, I’m not having the pair of you prancing around like showgirls. I paid for this place by the sweat of my brow and by god, I won’t have you girls turning it into a house of sin. The menswear salesman, like many middle-class men of his age, is always talking about his house: the work he’s done on his house, how much he paid for his house, and the sweat and tears and blood that flooded the purchase and upkeep of his house. The twins like to mock these bourgeois concerns. They are bright girls, emerging razor sharp through the fuzzy haze of puberty, and not the sort to forgive sentimentality. They are hard-hearted Hannahs, Cat and Patty. They are emblems of this new age, tricksters unable to be tricked. And as they go into temporary retreat after the belt and the broom are threatened, they start making plans to kill their parents.

  They change their imaginary stage name, from the Blue Falls County Jazz Babies to the Lizzie Borden Jazz Babies. They wonder how much an ax weighs and if they are strong enough to wield one. Separately? Together? They draw detailed pictures and check out all the books about Lizzie they can find in the library. They discuss ways to blame a killing on intruders. They discuss ways they could charm the police. They play their records on the gramophone, over and over, and dance the Lindy in the sad solitude of their bungalow bedroom. “To tease them and thrill them, to torture and kill them, is her delight, they say . . .” They study hard and get good grades, to deflect suspicion. They take ballet lessons. />
  Then Cat, Cat the second, Cat the accomplice, starts dating a boy. He is a nice, clunky-looking thing, half-formed in that way most young men are, and he is sixteen and strong and Cat thinks he is beautiful. He stops by the house to court her, and the menswear salesman likes the creases in his trousers. No bad young man, he tells his wife, would wear such sharp creases. Besides, his father is a wealthy farmer in the next town over, and they own a brand-new mahogany-colored Model Q. The menswear salesman approves of modern consumerism, if not modern music.

  Patty approves of none of this. For the first time in their whole lives, she refuses to speak to Cat. She feels like driftwood, like something dragging along—a useless appendage. She feels betrayed. Cat cries all night, offers to introduce her to the young man’s cousin. She begs her twin to speak to her again. Patty slips her a note: “GET RID OF HIM.” Cat cries again, but refuses. She believes she is in love. She believes that, for the first time, her heart is kindling, her body a brightening blaze. For the first time, her fingers and toes are no longer numb, her heart no longer frozen in the confusion of youth. Her heart is a little oyster shell, opening, opening.

  Patty, meanwhile, continues to make plans. But she no longer shares them with her sister. Every day after school she heads to the library, where it is assumed she is studying diligently, but where she is really researching the Borden murders. She wishes her family were wealthy so there would be a maid to blame. She wishes she were just a little bit bigger; there is no way for her to swing an ax alone, and anyhow, her mother and the menswear salesman do not own an ax. She makes lists of poisons, and how to attain them. She saves her pocket money. She is, though she refuses to believe it, desperately lonely for the first time in her life. She has not yet decided if she will poison her sister, too.

  Somehow the twins begin to grow, quite literally, apart. It is as though the rift between them has taken on a physicality, a kind of separation that finds itself in form as well as function. Cat continues with ballet and remains buoyant, floats long and lean, while Patty takes up tennis and becomes muscular and compact, all her grace anchored firmly in the earth. Cat is lovely and serious; Patty is sensual, all smiles and come-hither stares. She steps out with men older than the menswear salesman. She goes to wild parties, takes up smoking, hems her skirts above her knees, hides racy novels under the mattress. Cat reads Molière and dreams of marriage with the wealthy farm boy. She has never had to carry a conversation; that was Patty’s job. She feels, always, at a loss for words. She is sometimes content, but often she thinks she may drift away entirely, so unmoored she has become by the loss of her sister. Patty feels cleaved, still lonely, but liberated. She learns how to work a previously underutilized dimple on her left cheek, and fine-tunes the tones of innuendo in her pretty, deepening voice. She becomes popular. She decides to become an actress, though she does not tell her mother and the menswear salesman, who have definite opinions of women who “go onto the stage.”