Guises Read online

  “Hello,” Oanna says, and the day comes in with her. The way it feels on water as you move beneath it. It sparkles on her clothes and seems to sink, the way light does when it hits a sea surface, a pool, and slides in ripples down to be swallowed by the mass.

  I should talk. I can’t even feel the metal in my chair.

  How would I begin to know what the day on water feels like?

  (Because I remember. This says it all.)

  She comes over to my chair and touches my cheek.

  “It’s good to see you, Will,” she murmurs.

  That touch: for a moment I feel as if I’m swimming, submerged and in slow motion. But it’s only dizziness.

  George pulls a chair out for her, smiling. Serves the stir fry onto our plates, smiling. Brushes against her as he bends to pour iced tea into her glass. Suddenly I’m jealous of him. Because he can consciously move near her. His lids flutter slightly when they contact. His eyes mist over. As if that touch makes him dizzy, too.

  Or just plain excited.

  “I hope you like chicken,” he says to her as he sits next to me so he can feed me as well as himself.

  It’s kind of her not to stare.

  “Yes, I do,” Oanna replies as she harpoons a coated piece of meat and eats it.

  It takes a few minutes before my brother and I notice that the chicken is all she is eating. The elegantly trimmed little vegetables, crisp and brightly colored, remain on her plate.

  “Um…you’re welcome to join us tonight,” George offers, hopefully. “I’m roasting lamb. Maybe Scylla and Lorelei can come, too.”

  She shakes her head. “Thanks, but we’re having company.”

  I watch her hair float around her shoulders. How can it be so limp and sodden yet move so gossamer mystifies me. It could be made of cobwebs. Or of anemone.

  George is disappointed but he hides it well. I’m positively crestfallen. If I could manage it, I’d slump with visible dejection.

  I’m only hoping she’ll touch my cheek again before she leaves. Or maybe pat me on top of my head as if I were her faithful mutt. I want to see if that feeling returns to my limbs, of them dancing and kicking in the water, of submerging to inhale in gulps and exhale in bubbles.

  But she only waves.

  “Goodbye, Will,” with the murmur again and upraised fingers. “See you soon.”

  ««—»»

  I watch the three guys go up their sidewalk about an hour before sunset. College-aged, looks like.

  Stud-lies. Classic ones.

  Bearing store flowers with long stems in crisp, lime cellophane. Corked bottles of Chablis. A hunk for each sister, I guess.

  “When she said company, I didn’t know she meant dates,” George grumbles. He looks silly when he sulks, but I know how he feels.

  “Maybe they’re cousins or something,” I suggest.

  “Yeah, kissin’ cousins,” he replies with a pout.

  Unfair as it is—I mean where the hell would I be without George?—I’m a teensy bit glad that one of those beefcakes might get to Oanna instead of my brother. Somehow the idea of losing the woman I love to the person who dresses me and wipes my ass for me is too much to bear. I suppose I feel like more of a man if neither of us stands a chance.

  “Having quite a time, aren’t they?” George says after dark as we hear the party splashing next door.

  He’s wheeled me onto our back patio so he can listen in order to feel really rotten.

  “Well, it is a terrific pool,” I say. And can’t help reminiscing about swimming over there as a kid. Long before the Houston oil industry belly-flopped in the eighties, and the neighbors had to bail.

  Our own pool shimmers little under the lights from the house. Unevenly over the algae which thickly clouds the water. George keeps reminding himself to clean it, but he doesn’t want to hurt me by swimming in it himself—so it never gets used at all anymore. Sitting at the edge I can’t even see the tiles that line it. Just scum that reflects the overhead moon like it was a decomposing jawbone.

  “Ready or not, here I come!” I hear one of the hunks screech.

  There is a loud splash as he undoubtedly does a cannonball. Sounds of drunken hee-haws from the guys and slow, lapping water from the sisters.

  I imagine Oanna in a swimsuit. The tops of her breasts show like two widely spaced eyes. She doesn’t have large breasts, she’s too lithe. All three of them are very streamlined. If her hair is flat out of the water, does it seem to disappear altogether when she’s in the water?

  Bodies plunge next door. George and I can actually see droplets plume above the high fence line. They shower back down like silver coins in the partial darkness.

  I’m dying to feel it: the spray, the soak, the moist blankets of it. With Oanna in her bikini, sleek as a shark. Not beautiful. Not one who would ride the green foam on a shell like Botticelli’s Venus. Not even really pretty.

  So what do I see in her? What can I see in those flat, wet features?

  Have you ever seen a face in a painting that made you fall in love with eyes-in-oil? Have you ever met a lover in a dream that made real people seem like stones? Have you ever wanted to taste a teardrop because you knew that the woman who shed it was really weeping wine?

  I am a stone person. Inanimate and boulder-dense from the neck down.

  George is running his fingers through his hair, torturing himself, listening to Oanna and her sisters cavort with the stud-lies. I understand his attraction to her. He always did go for unattractive women. Just look at Susan.

  But the delicious aqueous sounds: the dousing, swashing liquids in jewels and cool deluges are nearly driving me crazy. Buried alive in my numbed shell, I yearn more than ever for the water. For one long, slaking drink of it with my whole body.

  Hours, damn it, hours. And then clouds skid across the moon. There is a sudden gulf shift again. The sky gets so freaking dark. The laughter next door ends abruptly. The splashing gets frenzied for a few minutes. Or for what seem like minutes but which might only have been seconds.

  Then there is no more sound at all, save for the water’s gently settling to stillness.

  ««—»»

  This night I dream about water again. I’m running for the edge, yearning for it. As a bird leaps from the tree into the sky. As cats and lovers run off into the night.

  I don’t even realize it when I wake up drenched. George—hearing me cry out—finds me covered in it. Sweat, of course. I can only tell by what’s in my hair, and that’s as cold as stormy sea spray. As if I’ve brought it back on me from the fantasy realm where I’ve just been submerged.

  I’ve had an orgasm, too.

  “Jesus, Will,” George mumbles as he strips off my soggy pajamas and then must wipe me clean. “I thought you couldn’t do that anymore.”

  “I guess I had a wet dream.” I chuckle but he doesn’t quite get the joke. He gives me a funny look.

  What would a shrink make of such a dream during analysis, other than to proclaim that the water represents a woman’s mouth and that my desire to hurl myself into it is orally motivated?

  An orgasm. Fancy that. A part of me works that isn’t supposed to. Like the return of water’s solace to my dreams, I can only chalk this up to Oanna. I wish she would invite us to one of their parties. She and her sisters have one every night now.

  ««—»»

  “Look at this,” George says.

  He’s agitated, facial muscles squirrely as he places the carefully folded newspaper on the table in front of me.

  There’s a photo of one of the three stud-lies who attended the sisters’ initial pool bash.

  The headlines read:

  MISSING YOUTH FOUND DEAD ON BEACH

  “Recognize him?”

  “Yeah,” I reply slowly.

  “Lot of men missing all of a sudden.” George’s mouth turns up and down at the corners as if he’s chewing on something. He’s popping his knuckles. “Both the others we saw are gone, too, by the way. Turned up mi
ssing the same night we saw them arrive at the sisters’ place.”

  “So?” I mean they could have stumbled onto the beach, drunk after the party, and passed out face down in the sea. They might have had a god damned car accident, their bodies dragged away from the wreckage by wild dogs.

  Yeah, sure.

  “Will, come on. It’s weird. We see those guys show up…but did we see anybody leave? Ever?” He’s anxious. He’s pacing the floor. “I think we should call the police.”

  “You call the police then. What’s this we shit?” I reply, wishing I could at least shrug helplessly but all I can do is roll my eyes.

  According to the paper, the body was bloated from having been in the ocean. And the fish had gotten to it.

  I try to flip it off, telling myself that there’s no way Oanna could be responsible. But I’m actually frightened at the idea that men go there and are seen no more. That’s natural. I’m also ticked off. Resignedly so. The sisters take them but not me? (This is not so natural.)

  The police show next door. They come here next.

  George lets them in.

  “What did they say?” he asks the two cops.

  “There was no one there. It doesn’t look as if anyone even lives there,” said one of them, a super tanned giant with hair as red as coral.

  George screeches, “What?”

  “There’s no furniture in the house. Only a few old lounge chairs and a table on the back porch, all pretty rusted. Peculiar. The pool is full of dead fish. Salt water varieties,” says the other officer, a Hispanic. He’s slimly muscled the way I used to be. His eyes are faintly bloodshot and his nails are scrupulously clean, so I know he is a swimmer.

  “The house is listed as vacant. The owners abandoned it, what, seven or eight years ago. Lots of big houses got dumped then. No one to buy them and the owners couldn’t keep them up after losing their butts,” adds the giant. “There’s no sign at all of any recent occupancy, sir.”

  The swimmer cop nods. “Not even of transients holing up for a night or two.”

  George protests. “That’s impossible! These women have been here for weeks. I helped ’em move in the porch stuff. It wasn’t rusty. Ask my brother.”

  I back him up. “They really were there. We’ve both heard the parties in the evenings. One of them, Oanna, even had lunch with us once. They’re real: Oanna, Scylla, and Lorelei.”

  “You have a last name for these three sisters?” asks the giant.

  George and I look at one another foolishly. Nope. We missed that detail. Never even thought about it. George shrugs and I roll my eyes again.

  “Sorry, we don’t know what it is,” George admits.

  “But they were here,” I say. “They were there just last night.”

  ««—»»

  There’s no party tonight. George and I both listen from our back porch. The fungus on our own pool shifts in a slight breeze that’s blowing from the gulf. It’s in crusts that buttress the cracks where black water lies still beneath. It’s hard and as smelly as old blood clots, loose as useless flesh—but, my god, I still wish I could lower myself into it and feel it move across me. Because it is water.

  Lying in bed where George dutifully places me, I think about swimming with Oanna, our arms around each other and kicking out with graceful strokes. Her sisters swim close by. Their bodies shine electric in the current, eelish and smooth.

  It’s spooky to watch long-haired women move underwater. They are slow motion ghosts, luminous swirls of ether. To touch them is to discover they’re solid, pliant. Their wide mouths have tongues in them that taste like chicken, taste like sweet shellfish and raw meat. My explosion in them is like any other explosion underwater. It is seismic, muted thunder, shaking each living cell of every organism.

  I wake up with my hair wet. Did I do it again? I can’t even put a hand down to see if my crotch is sticky. I don’t feel shaken.

  How could I? I’m a head.

  A skull with tensile coverage and nerve endings that go nowhere. It’s as if I was guillotined but the decap lived beyond its ten seconds. The executioners hauled away the useless bod, but here’s this head in the basket and it’s going to live forever.

  A twitch.

  A spasm.

  I see something moving under the covers. I realize it’s my right hand. By concentrating I can revolve it on the wrist. The fingers clutch and unclutch. Slowly I move each atrophied one independently, counting from thumb to the smallest digit. One to five.

  Thank you, Oanna.

  ««—»»

  We watch the house next door all day. George hoists a ladder against the redwood fence and climbs up to peek over.

  “Damn,” he mutters.

  “What?” I ask anxiously from my wheelchair.

  “It’s just as the cops said. Rusty,” he says. He wrinkles his nose. “They were right about the fish, too. I can see them belly up all over the surface. “Stinks and looks almost as bad as…”

  He doesn’t finish.

  As ours, I think he means. I know it. But he doesn’t want to articulate this because it’s his fault the pool is rancid oatmeal.

  Later he shows me the afternoon paper. They’ve found a couple of bodies on the beach again, snarled in the reeds.

  I think about the sky going dark and the furious thrashing.

  But no one screamed.

  During all the parties we never heard any of those men scream.

  “George?” I pipe up as he clips the before portraits and the subsequent gruesome death photos of the two guys.

  “What, Will?” he replies but doesn’t look up from the scissors. He pushes his tongue against the side of his open mouth the way he does when he’s doing some serious thinking.

  “Do you think Oanna and her sisters are mad at us now?”

  He glances over at me and the expression in his eyes is terrible. Not unlike how he looked when we were clinging to the wreckage from our sailboat.

  ««—»»

  George has taken me from the wheelchair and set me into the hydraulic bath lift. It hums me down against the porcelain, into the water I do not sense. The room has steamed up, humid as it is on the coast. But thick, almost opaque. He starts to soap me over. He uses Irish Spring and I like the way it smells, but it sure doesn’t make me feel fresh all over. Maybe I get a little color in my cheeks.

  I sneak a look over George’s shoulder to see if I can see my face in the full-length mirror on the door. The glass is shrouded in hot fog. I see a mirage in it. It shocks me really hard that I stare, unable to speak for so long that the spray from the rinsing shower might have worn away the tile.

  There is a woman in the mirror.

  With small misty breasts and wide eyes of glistening vapor.

  Her arms foam toward me.

  It is Oanna.

  It is not Oanna.

  It is she but transformed, all silver as if before she’s been nothing but an unexposed photographic plate. And now the picture of jewels and veils-of-dimension has been developed.

  George finally notices the shock on my face and turns around.

  “Holy shit,” he gasps as the green and white striped bar squirts out of his hand.

  “You see her, too?” I ask, wishing I could tremble.

  He nods and jerks back to switch off the water. I blink as droplets dapple my face, forming a patina on my lashes. When we look again, she’s gone.

  Something glistens on the checkerboard floor in front of the mirror.

  It’s a fish, its gills fluttering as it flops weakly, scales a fading rainbow.

  ««—»»

  The bath lift raises me up and George hurriedly dries me off. He yanks a robe around me, and sets me back into the wheelchair. He towels the suds from his own arms and rolls me out onto the patio.

  He scampers back up that ladder.

  “What do you see?” I ask him.

  He’s shaking his head. “Nothing.”

  There is a sound in our sludgy pool. A spl
op.

  George spins on the ladder in surprise and nearly loses his footing. The ladder rungs rattle against the fence.

  “Be careful!” I cry out.

  He climbs back down and walks shakily around the pool’s perimeter. We both see the fish as it jumps through a crack in the scum and knifes back in. Moonlight flashes off its argentum sides. How could it have gotten there? Without a viable link to the Gulf?

  The algae ripples, bounces, rolls as fish bob gasping between the green cankers on the surface. George gets down on his knees to get a closer look in the dark.

  The rind on the water undulates and his eyes are wild, glittering mercury like the fish do. There’s a lump in my mouth as I realize that my brother is terrified.

  Then he smiles.

  “George! What is it?” I guess my heart’s pounding. I only know because my head’s pounding in reply. I can hear it thundering in my ears, the way of massive waterfalls and crashing waves.

  George slowly puts his hand down to the scabrous water, almost shyly. His fingers brush the corrugated slime. Fungus coats first his wrist, then his arm. He falls into the pool.

  “George!” I shriek as my fat lump sits disabled, castrated from the neck down.

  I have never felt so powerless.

  He disappears under black water that begins to churn violently. The pool erupts as liquid spumes with stagnant pastes in shades from olive bile to sable glue across the porch. It clings to my face.

  To the fingers of my right hand, dangling down to the wheel, stretching to grasp the rim to push, to turn it. I feel it dripping from my fingertips like placenta.

  I feel nothing in between. Not in the chest nor the shoulder. Not in the arm where the nerve impulses must fire to produce movement in the hand and wrist. I am just a head.