by Jane Eisenhart

Around the first indication of seasonal change — in this case, a stronger than usual wave issuing through Y-shaped weeds on the Academy lawn — Christine became able to put her strange feeling into words.  Doctor Frankland agreed to conduct their session outdoors, conceding that the summer had been too boilingly peevish to allow even the stroll beneath oaks and evergreens she’d asked him for several times, with so little variation in her tone of voice.  Now, they spread a lilac-and-white checkered blanket on the ground just before an unruly hump of grass that gave way, on its other side, to a downward coast that tumbled eventually into the Academy’s fence.

He started directly, asking what it was she wanted to tell him and receiving the answer, “There’s a smell . . .not a food smell . . .and I smell it and crave . . .drinking.  Just something.  Drinking it by two jugs at the same time and drinking all of that until it gets outside my stomach — is that . . .what I’m trying to say?  Until it, like it comes out in droplets.  Through the barrier of my stomach.”

“It seeps through.”

“Seeps, that’s it.  I want to drink until that happens and I explode through my stomach.”

Frankland inspected their landscape, which still held the yellow-green luster of warmer months, and asked her, “Is the smell here now?”

She shook her head that it was not.  “From.  From time to time.  It’s not often, but’ll be, like, when the long-beds, the eighteen-wheels, pull up and the man looks in the side-eye on the truck and goes and gets the, um . . .plastic, like red and yellow, I think it is usually.  And then when Mister Kenny undoes the lid on the lawnmower before he cuts.”

Frankland’s eyebrows gamely lifted, his head bobbed.  “Gasoline.”

Christine looked sideways at him as she rubbed her palms over the blond stubble foresting her legs; she did not shave this, either because shaving yet meant nothing to her as a mile marker in her daily routine, or because a slippery corner of something had come back to her and she recalled a prohibition against it not worth breaking.  This matter Frankland would not knead on right now.

Christine asked him, “That’s strange?”

“Mm.  It’s not what most of us would consider appetizing, but I’d imagine there’s a perfectly normal explanation for it in your case.  Sometimes people do crave things they really shouldn’t eat.  Called pica.”

Though they talked for several minutes more and proceeded with an application Frankland took most serious–eating wild salmon sandwiches on whole wheat–their main business was concluded when they whittled the object of Christine’s appetite down to the ripened smell of gasoline.  From there, he asked her to concentrate on that specific interplay of her senses, to follow the entanglement back as far as she could in an attempt to find where along the strange way fuel became cross-referenced with an insatiable thirst for Christine.

The letter to Tripp entailed little in the way of a greeting, but this had become usual after quite a few slips of correspondence on company letterhead between Frankland and the plump, raspberry-cheeked journalist.

Tr.,

Understand you’re pressed for deadline, yet there’s only so much I can do with one critical scene AWOL and no one around to give an idea what happened.  As for filling in gaps on the character of Micah, I’ll do my best.  What little I myself know of him, I know only from his rounds guest-lecturing in mine & Dr. Cleaver’s rooms, and I can tell you off that–whether or not you’ll believe me is unforeseen, would be hard to, I understand this–I knew what he was from the first sermon at the pulpit he gave.  Liquid-tongued charlatan.  Quacker from the tit on is what I imagined him, so braided in his own delusions it was hard to see him ever possessing the innocent mindscape a child seems to have, if you know what I’m saying by this.

Don’t profess to know the ins and outs of him, and I can’t lend my support to glamorizing him, painting him out of be a badgered nugget-heart always justified in his own noggin in what he did, if that’s where you intend to take it, hope not, certainly hope not.

Most of what I know about the man’s details, I know from the others who made it away.  When they told the parts about him, they looked this way to me:  they started a bonfire in one place, knew exactly where that place was, then glance up and see fire’s tripled its spread in the blink of an eye.  Here’s the way I mean, if you don’t follow: Good ol’ fire, they start out saying, Good ol’ Micah. Then there’s the reflection in their eyes of burnt blackbird carcasses falling out of trees.

I hear that he got his hooks in her mid a philosophy class, rattling off his sh__ called Discerning the Merits of a Vigilante, most likely lending her a good, steady stare all through the class.  I give him this much, though myself don’t consider it a credit:  that’s that he knew who to aim his darts at.  Stands before a gallery of thirty odd students a lecture, and he recognizes who in the room came from an insular, guarded, little out-of-town place, and who therefore naturally struggles to fit into this brand new tapestry.

But you didn’t request my full-on examination of tactic and appeal, so I’ll spare you any further of that.  You asked for that cubic zerconia, Micah Brentwood, and I’ve given you what I can of him, and you asked for clarity on what happened to the girl.

Some things she knew because he had described them to her in a grandfatherly voice, not minding to repeat himself when she forgot all the lines, curves and shading of what he’d last said and only recalled that there had been a type of operation.  One day–vivid day, the tree leaves juggling balls of sunlight above her–he had entertained rather than confused her with the story.

“We drilled a hole in the back of your head, inserted two thins rods inside your thalamus –”

“How thin were the rods?”

“Oh, I never took time to measure them.  They were just some shaven pipe-cleaners we found laying around the O.R.”  He had watched her, his face lengthened into a look of anticipation, until she gave him the laugh he’d undoubtedly wanted to hear.  Caught warmly in the cradle of his beam and the then-April sky’s, she had been satisfied that day to hear his continuing explanation:  “Shortly thereafter, you went from staring very dumbfoundedly at us to repeating words said to you, recognizing colors, eventually tying your own shoelaces.”

It was difficult to justify, even to herself, why she didn’t ask more questions, didn’t host more curiosity than she did upon hearing a description of herself as once dumbfounded, or catatonic, or empty.  The only way she could defend herself was by way of one of the many comparisons that came to her rapidly now, even though they seemed to come pitched down from the witnessing clouds mostly and not as original creatures of her own mind.  In this comparison, she was a baby so enveloped in keeping careful eye on the changes and the patterns around her that, for a long time, tracing matters back to even the day before didn’t occur to her.

Finally, they did, and she asked Frankland why she had been comatose when others had not; the understanding that this state separated her from people outside the gate had been long in culmination.  He responded she had been damaged in some kind of rough mugging, and that she would remember it as she needed to.

“You will in time,” he said, “and you’ll need to, because I can’t very well keep drilling notches into your head.”

On the day of her assignment to locate the intersection of raw gasoline and her salivation, she ruminated on what she already knew about herself.  More accurately, she played carefully with the fringes of what she thought she knew; she knew, after all, for certain, that scraps of what she imagined to be herself predating the Academy could merely be stills from an especially sharp dream, qualifications of an imaginary friend she’d fostered in her childhood, forever ago, far beyond the fingertips of her memory.  There were things she strongly believed she knew, though:  that she had been madly in love with government, that she had not shaved the fine hairs from her paltry legs, and that she had a brother named Micah.  She spun these three awarenesses so quickly in her head that she hoped they would blur together and form a ceaseless disc with one another.  No matter how fast she spun them, though, the posited facts of herself did not blend; and no matter how close she snuck to the lawnmower with its hood popped vertical, she could not put her finger on why the pungent smell made her not just want, but violently need, to drink.

I’d say that all three of us are making the mad scramble for this last piece of puzzle, except I’m not sure that Christine cares.  Not sure I would care if I were her, not sure she should care.  We have an idea of up to the moment and after the moment from the others, and I chance to say a good look-see into the girl’s psyche itself provides insight into that elusive moment itself, probably?

See her now, and you have seen her, from a distance.  See her studying political science with dreams twice size of the American God, quaking in her sandals because Here is significantly big/rowdier/grayer than Back There, and being shoved eye-to-eye with this egomaniac who claims to debunk the entirety of law and order in one measly paper, probably pounded out while the zerconia was plastered foolish-drunk one night.

See her through the story you’ve heard already, through each phase of it chronologically & here we go:  the lovey embrace of he and his household where she thinks, “Ah, I’ve discovered something better than any church–same beefy hug, yet founded in knowledge, as I came here hot after, and not mired in unscaled tradition like all the institutions of yore, of Back There.”  Do you see her feeling the “intelligent” city-boy’s eyes linger on her?  Do you see her starting to write papers in his house, with his input, telling herself, “For A, it’s quieter here and for B, the man is everything that challenges my long-held beliefs, and since Back There was so glaringly wrong, all my long-held beliefs hatched in that place must be wrong, too.  And he knows it.  He knows it.”  See her now?

I think a pivotal side-note of our young-lady Christine that can’t be overlooked in this matter is that, to me, to me obviously, she had already decided that the insular, Podunk wherever Iowa was insufficient on her own, and this wasn’t an idea supplanted by the zerconia.  She had reasons in her head, didn’t she?, to run and cling and dig as deeply as she could wherever the shovel would easily sink in.

One boy interviewed reported he routinely saw her up at three o’clock in the morning typing, and that it went from getting out her own thoughts that supported Micah’s anarchical craze to, shortly, just transcribing what Micah himself told her.  This leads me to imagine that, right now, if–of course, if–things had happened differently, Micah would be lecturing at his next college and maybe this time growing the epitomal balls and hitting up a rural community college size of a postage stamp where he wouldn’t even have to aim his gun to hit supper.  Yes, Tripp, I see him memorizing a paper our Christine wrote for him, essentially spreading out the translucent, sticky sheet of fly paper for the next one.

So, we know she stayed loyal and hippie-legged for Brother Micah until the moment, & what more to say of that moment that you need to pin down with your journalistic paws?  I’ve probed around past the extent I feel comfortable with, at first gleefully, then amid an internal debate you wouldn’t understand, fellow, until you’ve eased a wire down into the gray rivets of a young girl’s head.  In my nightmares, she tilts her head back to look at the stars and flaccid brain matter leaks to the ground.

I have another strategy in mind, now, one that may be more effective than anything so far.

She assumed a meditative posture she’d learned in therapy which was general, not Buddhist nor Hindu necessarily, in order to arrive within herself.  While she disliked roping herself off this way from the sight of the rippling Y’s, shadows bobbling, occasional dashers-by on the sidewalk beyond the fence who seemed to hang indefinitely in a leap from one foot to the other, she couldn’t lose herself to these things if she intended to trace the mystery of her taste.

In order to maintain this stiff positioning of her legs and reel her mind inward, she realized, she must have some conviction that this weird thing of herself was a ribbon worth pulling. Dr. Frankland had seemed to hunker down and become slightly wider in his right eye than his left when she’d mentioned it, and she had no reason not to trust him when he implied the staggering importance of something or other.  She had, after all, just been born, five-foot-seven and spindly on a yellow-green knoll, and she would be strange to distrust her mother’s nipple.

Still, some matters would roar their importance one moment for her, then would whimper off as though scared by a hulking shape that loomed behind her.  Of course Christine wanted to know why she wanted to drink toxic fuel, but she also didn’t mind this lazy purgatory of not exactly knowing either; it felt like a return to a most comfortable sling of arms.

Of course there were pictures of fire saddled to the gaseous scent, and this nothing remarkable, even she knew that.  She knew much more than she could clay into words and phrases at this point.  Along with fire, there were other associations that had to be blindingly normal to the observational eye, such as images of herself standing at a gas pump, pressing three fingers into the trigger because it took all three to encourage the let-down reflex of the pump; an image of her trampling through loose car innards in a spacious garage with three loudly rotating fans, a human-sized cooler of Cokes and Mellow Yellows to the left, a greasy boy with an uncomfortably big Adam’s apple who embraced her in front of all the other greasy guys and said he’d sure-hell missed her.

Then the image of fire–a consuming blaze leaping up stairs and racing down ceiling rafters.  Now, this was more specific.  This could have been her recollection of the fear scene in a fear movie, except that she became able–in her meditation beside the open lawnmower–to see herself standing in a kitchen as the linoleum floor melted and curled around her, far from caring, pouring a pitcher of iced tea into her mouth, over her chin, onto her plain white t-shirt.

That was all she collected before her eyes opened and the Academy came galloping again into view.  It made no sense to her.  While she considered it was her criss-crossed wiring that rejected this image as a real and cohesive thing, she did not truly think so.  She thought it would rank odd in anyone’s sight for her, Christine, to douse herself in sweet tea while the house around her was scalded.  But she felt a palpitation, a series of them, actually, that knocked more and more angrily against her ribs, telling her that she had stumbled on something.

While the first impulse raking through her frame was to run to Dr. Frankland with news of the image, a single thought prevented her from any enthusiasm toward this.  Side-lined at first, then imposingly on her in a way that blocked out her sunlight and therefore started to anger her:  whether or not she’d been drinking tea with flowers in her eyes while a house burned down, the crux of this image was that a house had burned down, that she had narrowly escaped it for not caring about anything but the pitcher.  Then there was a conclusion that seemed worthwhile to her and, though she preferred to believe–this time–that her battered and perforated brain didn’t know what it was suggesting, she felt the suggestion anyway.  The suggestion was that she had died running from the fire, only to later be injected back to life by Dr. Frankland and other curiously peering doctors at the Academy.

There it sat, a clunky new gear installed in Christine’s mind:  she had died outrunning a fire, not in what he had called a “rough mugging.”

Here’s what you may record as my professional opinion regarding what happened in that moment, based on meticulous examination of Christine, lobe to lobe:  All signs point to the idea that she did nothing more than try to escape his household after she’d determined it to be a devil’s tool-shed of sorts.  She’d insisted on going back to Iowa for her mother’s birthday, and I am assured by everyone willing to speak on the condition of anonymity that the zerconia spent her whole leave barking orders at the others, being peevish and bratty on the whole & possibly because his self-purported powers of insight were, for once, actually manifested.  Imagine that, will you?  That now’s the time it works for him.  He could sense that bumpkin, nowhere Iowa could encroach on his territory, and he felt this one who wrote such good, such persuasive, such mind-bending papers on his behalf slipping away.

That he yelled at everyone, spit in the morning’s scrambled eggs and cracked one house-boy’s shoulder blade underneath the heel of his boot — well, these things are beyond question.  You can question me on this next, and who knows what you’ll question and what you’ll leave to sleep when you throw this whole hap-dash thing together & therefore question away if you will, but there’s no point in extending your questions to me anymore.

This is my final opinion of Christine, pledged sister of the ringleader Micah, and that’s that she returned from Iowa mauve-cheeked and with shaven legs because she’d gone and sampled the unpardonable:  she’d seen that her old Iowan boyfriend wasn’t the flat-headed shoehorn she remembered him to be, and that he especially didn’t seem so lousy in comparison to the zerconia, who had to have everything Just So and watch over her shoulder and slam his furry-knuckled hand on the countertop — making spoiled bananas on their hanger hooks jump — when she didn’t write the way he spontaneously spoke.

He spotted the clean legs as her transgression, probably made some foolish pronouncement that she might like to experience a full-body shaving, one that would include skin and everything else, if–if–she dared betray the household, and all young-lady Christine would’ve needed to say to save herself was that someone made her do it in light of some event.  There would’ve been some punishment, certainly, for the zerconia would still consider loyalty the highest of all virtues and would think that she hadn’t been loyal enough, yet knowing she’d been shanghaied into it might’ve soften his blow.

For Peter’s sake, Tripp, Christine attended that school because she won a full scholarship–no inflatable dummy in my estimation.  You’ve seen her from a distance, read the transcripts, even–hell, even–talked to some of the others who knew her who were too skittish to take off their sunglasses & rosary beads, spent the whole time looking at us though we were human skin stretched around a volatile breed of alien.  I’m saying this:  you’ve been wound tight in the story of Christine.  You know her, and she’s quick.  She’s the brain I’ve wanted to plod around in for half my career, and here she is docile as a kitten with its eyes shut, leaning forward while I electrify her brains.

She’s intelligent, and she would’ve known how to escape the wrath of a hot-headed cult boss unless she’d decided it was wrong that she needed work to avoid it.  She’d done nothing wrong.  She’d shaven her g.d. legs to look summery for a boy back home, and maybe decided that the only thing Micah had been right on all along was his original sermon, probably written by someone else:  there were merits of the vigilante, even when the governing order had so much changed.

Christine stood up from her grass pallet beside the lawn mower, then walked toward the main entrance of the Academy, flanked on either side by stone, mythical creatures who had spirals for eye sockets and curly mains.

She thought it was strange that she could feel more certain about something that had not happened than something that had.  No one had roughly mugged her.  And the gasoline thirst that felt similar to ashes heaved over the mound of her tongue and down her throat couldn’t be chalked up to the home-grown garage she remembered, or thought she remembered, in which some lanky boy stood there smiling at her and telling her it was so good to see her ‘gain, so good to touch ‘er.

As she walked through the echoing, narrowing hall, Christine envisioned herself knocking on Dr. Frankland’s office door, then telling him how she had come to her exclusions, then asking him why he’d seen fit to tell her about a mugging if, in fact, there had been a fire.

It helped to rehearse, helped her turn up logical words when she opened her mouth.

When she confronted him with this, she realized, she would be positioned deep in the halls of a building possibly equipped to retain those it wanted to retain.  She didn’t know about this part, neither knew why the matter harped around in her head and evoked those familiar palpitations.

Could it be that she couldn’t trust her own irises even now, after Dr. Frankland’s manual prying through her brain?

Her fingers touched the stucco, gray-and-darker-gray wall beside her, and she didn’t feel hesitant to deduce these were the properties of the wall:  stucco, gray-and-darker-gray.

She didn’t need to fetch for a second opinion, one from someone who hadn’t been left paddled and bruised by, apparently, a rough mugging.

So, she didn’t apologize, and zerconia set his own house on fire, every bit that enraged that his newest stenographer — a cute one, indeed — would dare defy the house rules, especially for something come out of the ignorant land she’d left.  No one saw him come out of his own fire and I’d whole-heartedly suspect that, standing there and being basically awakened by a set of bright flames and the stench of lumber smoke, all the others didn’t give two shiny ones whether or not Micah did emerge.  I’d like to think the fire broke them out of his grasp, and maybe it did, maybe it didn’t, hard to say–you saw them:  still squirrelly eyed.

And that is that, friend.  My half of the advance on publication arrived yesterday, it’s prompt delivery greatly appreciated.  I wish you success in all your ways.  As for me, I’ve handled the brain I’ve always wanted, and I’ve seen the intentional-or-not suicide of a false professor–be hard to climb higher, if you understand my meaning.  Vacation time for me and my German Shepherd.

Sincerely,

Joseph Frankland, M.D.

He didn’t answer his door when she knocked, so she sat in one of the paunchy, hallway seats outside his door to wait.  On the coffee table beside her, where Dr. Frankland always kept issues of psychology and car magazines, Christine spotted an enveloped addressed to someone named Martin Tripp, unsealed and labeled on its open, out-jutting flap:  re: the strange case of Christine Hodge.

Though she felt a bit sluggish, as she would in a dream-state, she slid out the letter inside with no qualms.

It took an hour and a half for her to read the simple epistle, and this because her ability to read and process was stuck along the same plane as her ability to speak the way she wanted to.

An hour and a half after beginning, Christine folded the letter neatly back into its pocket, and then she jogged back down the hallway, toward air.

Outside, she huffed, she held onto her knees, she flicked her eyes up at the gate that, at this point, could still be opened — scaled if it couldn’t be opened, if it came down to that.  But as she found herself spinning backward to check that no one had followed her from the mammoth Academy — the Academy fire-red with its mortar-colored freckles — she also found herself facing Frankland, who seemed to be calm, unhurried, as he took her shoulder.

She could only manage to ask him, “How?” and to her, this encompassed the breadth of the world, one border to the other.

Doctor Frankland, who had tinkered with the casing of her brain and the deep-asleep thalamus inside, now smiled at her warmly.  The smile was a proud sort, the type he might display having seen his granddaughter mount the stage and receive her awarded scroll from the principal, the dean, someone.  His answer to her:  “There was lying, my dear.  Not to you.”

He handed her an envelope, thin enough that she could make out the skeletons of expensive bills, and leaned down to talk into her ear.  “This is yours for the story, Christine.  And the privilege.”  In an initiation of their first contact of the kind, he placed his hands on her face rather than on the curve of her head.  He told her, “Micah didn’t escape your fire.  You were one of the few who did.  The only thing I’d like to know, if you don’t mind, is why this thirst for the gasoline that started it.”

His eyes squinted, the Y-weeds lay over gracefully in their first fall wind, and she said, “He locked me in the garage.  For shaving my legs.  I was there three days, and the can of it right beside me.”

The doctor nodded.  “And did you?”

Christine then shook her head, briefly remembering how luscious to her that pungent container had been.  No, she hadn’t succumbed to it’s beckon; she’d held out for the tea.

Before she left the Academy, to go where she would go, Christine Hodge told the doctor, “It didn’t come to that.”

____________________________________

Jane Eisenhart has been published in Sotto Voce Magazine, and her short fiction will soon appear in Diet Soap Magazine and Writer’s Bloc from Rutgers-Camden.  Her blog (heavy on political philosophy, maintained by her first-life avatar Hannah Eason) can be found at Shiloh Doesn’t Care.

Tagged as: Literature in the Media, New Literature Online, Short Story

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