Fantastic Metropolis

After Abigail vanished, Mother, Father, and I did our best to fill the hole she had left behind—“with good, black earth,” Mother said, “a heavy stone on top.”

At first we entertained a hushed silence—never speaking of her, nor for that matter, of much of anything. We kept busy at our separate tasks, although I must admit I often pretended to be busy. ‘But then little by little we began to speak together again and—as if by silent consent—to recreate the past sans Abigail. This involved a great deal of concentration and imagination. It became a game as well as an act of faith, or I should say: love. For in this way we were able to reassure one another and to prove that our affection was real, somehow legitimate (as if that needed to be proved!) and that we were worthy of being called a family. The unexpected effect of all this tender subterfuge was that I learned to speak convincingly and with eloquence on just about anything and so to contribute to important causes—such as Deacon Hill’s charities. And if Mrs. Livesday has chided me about what she calls my “antiquated manner” and “eccentricities of speech,” I pride myself upon this capacity. I see myself not only as Christ’s spokeswoman, but a servant of Good English. Before Abigail vanished, her conversation rattled and belched with absurdist “slang.”

“What news,” Mrs. Livesday asked as we returned the way we had come up the path, “have you of your sister?”

“Abigail is beyond repair,” I answered her, and with such acidity that Mrs. Livesday, if she frowned, did not dare ask me about my sister again. Perhaps because of my curt reply, lunch was eaten in silence, and after coffee Mrs. Livesday retired.

Sometime in midafternoon as I lay in my chamber in an attempt to refresh my brain, I heard her depart with Cobb for town (a salmon had been ordered from the city for our supper) and overheard the following; it stabbed me to the quick:

Cobb: Is Miss Hubble coming with us?

Mrs. Livesday: Good gracious, no! She’d spoil our fun. Let’s steal away, Cobb. Now!

Well what of it if I had been brusque. She was, after all, an intrusive busybody who had no right, no right whatsoever, to bring up family matters out of the blue. And now the dreadful poppets were all gazing at me, or so it seemed, with eager eyes. “Tell Oz,” I continued the letter to the Deacon in my head, “that the Barry town harem is begin- ning to test my temper.” I closed my eyes.

The trilling was deeper now; it had gathered energy and speed. Overtaken by exhaustion, it seemed to me that a blizzard of sound was raging in my skull, so that when I slept I dreamed of ice. In my dream I was struggling along a narrow isthmus hemmed in on all sides by ice. I knew that I needed to head south, else die, and prayed for the sun to guide me. And then I saw it blazing before me beyond a veil of snow and sleet. As I battled on I could hear the ice falling with a fearful distinctness, but the sun was fuller now; it began to blaze with such intensity I feared as much for my life as before. The sun’s shape was strange—more like a vertical mouth—and I knew with rage and horror that it was not the sun at all but Abigail’s vulva burning above my face.

I awoke then, shuddering and drenched with perspira- tion. The sun was sinking; low on the horizon it had, for an instant, flooded the room. I lay panting until it had set, until I lay in shadow, until the first crickets began their chirping—so shocked by the vision in the dream that I prayed: Let me be turned to stone this instant! For that is precisely what I thought I deserved—to be rendered blind and deaf and mute. But instead of turning to stone, I lay hot and heavy on the bed until I heard a sound beyond those of evening, beyond, even, the ringing of my mind, a sound akin to the rustle of dry leaves in the wind or the sensuous rasp a taffeta gown makes on the body of an actress as she moves across the stage; a sound of such intense sweetness that my heart was at once throbbing with a rare delight. A delicious sound and captivating—and yet chilling because so feral. A wild, extravagant murmur unlike anything I had ever heard before. I raised myself from my pillow then and stared at the door expectantly. I should not have been surprised had Pan himself walked into the room. I waited. Nothing out of the ordinary occurred except that once the moment had passed I felt an acute sense of loss, or longing—I cannot say which—as though something offered had been taken back.

Because I had to, I next bathed and dressed, did my hair, and, succumbing to a rare moment of vanity, pulled out some silver by the roots. I thought: My eyes are still quite fine. Opening the lavatory door I heard a familiar domestic clatter, the table being set deep within the house, the oven door opening and closing, and made my way down two flights of stairs to the first floor, which was brightly lit and submerged in the fragrant smells of Cobb’s excellent cooking.