Close Encounters Read online

  “I told you, Michael, I’m a little leery about our having any children. I don’t want to pass any mental illness onto them.”

  “You’re being silly, Jul.” He put his hands across his chest. “You are the most sane person I know.”

  “It’s just so odd that I cannot put my finger on it.” I dropped the journal to the side of the bed alongside the others. “Julia-Ann was as real as you are to me. She had her own voice, her own talents—she was good at things at which I am absolutely not gifted and haven’t been since she went away.”

  “It’s all guilt.” He patted my shoulder. “I’ve seen it hundreds of times in overachieving children. They feel guilty—they’re too gifted. In your case, you attributed some of your ‘talents’ to another person. The gifts are just repressed deep in you. I keep telling you, Jul, take a painting class or something. You’ll see that you’re just as talented as ‘Julia’ than Julie-Ann ever was.”

  He did not know that I was afraid of such a proposition. In fact, I avoided all activities that might serve to awaken Julie-Ann. Perhaps I was being paranoid; Julie-Ann had been gone for more than fifteen years. However, whenever Michael suggested the theater, an art exhibition, a concert, I pleaded disinterest and didn’t accompany him. I began to worry that I bored him, that he would think I was rather stodgy, never wanting to have any fun.

  But nothing seemed to bother him more than my fear of pregnancy. He ran battery after battery of tests on me, in his own fashion, over meals, in bed, on the commute, on vacations. All served to remind me that I was a perfectly normal woman in her early thirties, if a bit dull. I decided to chance it.

  When the doctor informed us we were expecting I could not have been happier. Although I worried that hormonal changes might affect my emotional state, Michael assured me that everything would be fine. And everything was, for the most part, until the sonograms showed what appeared to be twins.

  Only one twin was inside the other.

  “It’s a fairly rare condition,” the doctor explained, tracing his pen along a radiograph of my abdomen. “Fetus in fetu—child inside child.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?” I asked. “Surely the one child will kill the other, growing inside it like that.”

  “Usually the inner child is parasitic, yes, but not a viable human entity,” the doctor agreed. “The child is more like a tumor—a tumor with a spine, perhaps some malformed appendages—but in no way a fully living, conscious entity. Usually the mother is able to carry it to term. And then we extract the teratoma from the healthy child.”

  “Are you certain that I will be able to carry this child full-term?” I questioned, touching my stomach. Would the turmoil awaken her? What if she were the turmoil?

  “We’ll closely monitor your progress,” he assured. “We don’t catch most cases of this particular oddity until after childbirth usually, so we’re ahead of the curve here.”

  The first few months came and went without incident. Gradually, however, I began to feel stirrings.

  It was hard to describe them. It was too early for the baby to be moving, and yet I felt a specific movement, someone turning over in bed, shaking off sleep. And I began to feel more aware of things, like the color of the sky behind the swaying trees, the sounds of the breeze through their leaves, the smell of sycamore and pine, of wet grass. I began to doodle at work, to hum along with the songs on the radio. It was so much like her, these things, but she was not here, not that I could tell. And yet, I didn’t feel quite myself. It seemed that there were hours of the day that I couldn’t account for—the time between university and home, arriving at our doorstep hours after dinnertime, Michael opening the door with a flourish, his sleeves rolled up and his hair falling in long wisps across his creased forehead.

  “Where’re you been, Julia? I’ve been worried sick.”

  “I felt a little nauseous, so I took a nap in the office. It came on so suddenly…I couldn’t get to the phone to call.”

  “Perhaps we should see the doctor, then.” He led me to the kitchen, where an overcooked, rubbery casserole awaited. I was not hungry; I could taste the burn of wasabi on my tongue. Had I eaten sushi? He sat across the table and stared at me intently with those calculating blue eyes of his. I smiled slightly and let a rubbery glob of cheese and noodle slide down our—my—throat.

  Other times I would wake up fully dressed in the kitchen in the middle of the night wearing jeans and a shirt that formerly were regulated to garden duty or the market, leaving or coming back I could not tell. What a strange time in one’s life to discover sleepwalking, I would muse, and thereafter, I began to tie a cord from my wrist to the bedpost.

  I dreamt long, vivid dreams about untying the rope, getting dressed in the same awful old clothes, and walking about the town at night, looking in shop windows, familiarizing myself with roads and walkways, engaging in discussion with the most horrible and dangerous of men, men who rode motorcycles and had necks as roped and thick as bridge girders, whose teeth were stained with tobacco. I dreamt I took our car at high speeds through the countryside, pulling over at a patch of moonlit wildflowers and dancing in their adoring throngs. I dreamt I sat in the coffee shops listening to the clove-smoking university students talk about Keats and Sartre and the Motherwell retrospective while they drank coffee out of cups the size of soup bowls, and I knew what these dreams meant, and I knew it was all right to feel something was missing in my life, amidst the stodgy, safe conservatism of it all. But after all, I had a good career and a loving husband and a child on the way and perhaps after the baby was born, Michael and I could do something more risqué.

  However, when I went to ask him one morning, as we got ready to leave for work, he came back in the house smiling.

  “The wildflowers you left in the car, Julia, left dirt all over the seat.” He wiped the back of his pants before giving me a quick kiss. “I mean, they’re a sweet touch, but goodness, now I’ve got to change!”

  I began to remember Julia Ann’s laugh, a somewhat sharp, barking squeal, a sound I thought I had forgotten years ago. Out of curiosity, I began trying to imitate it when around colleagues, while out at dinner with Michael, a premeditated bit of spontaneous joy that fell flat, insincere, when it passed through my lips. It was certainly not mine—Julia’s laugh—and yet we had shared the same vocal chords. We had the same muscle of tongue, the same air expelled through our shared lips. I could not understand it, just as I could not believe she was gone. Was she really gone or was she just biding her time, waiting for her moment to emerge, to wrest control of our body from my grasp? Was she slowly consuming my children—or me?

  I am foolish to think such things.

  At some point the stirrings became unbearable.

  “You can’t be going into labor already,” Michael shook his head as I described the feeling of opening, of water breaking, of something pushing, wanting out, wanting to part with me, believing it was time. Or perhaps needing, gasping, wanting more oxygen, more room, more…life. “You have to cancel your appointments at the clinic. We’re going to the doctor this morning.”

  “It is consuming the other one.” The doctor held up the ultrasound. “We’re going to have to abort.”

  “What do you mean?” I questioned. “You said the other child was usually harmless.”

  “The in fetu pregnancy is such a rare case that it’s hard to predict what will happen.” He shook the film slightly in his hand. “In this case, the vital child appears to be a malignancy—or have a malignancy—that is consuming it. I’m very sorry.”

  “Are you sure it’s not…”

  “It’s not what, my dear?”

  “I just feel so…drained.” I put my hand to my head. My thoughts, actions had been so muddled as of late. The reality of the doctor before me was tenuous, grainy, and quite removed, as if I were looking at him through the inside of my head, far away, so far away. I just wanted to sleep. “I’m very weak, you see.”

  The surgery was scheduled for
the next morning. Michael and I waited in the hospital room, the antiseptic shell that would protect me from greater harm. As I looked at the cracks in the ceiling, Michael dug into a snack bag of potato chips from the vending machine.

  “We should never have done this.” I shook my head. “Not while she is still here.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Julia, you have to stop it with that.” He crunched the shiny cellophane into his fist. “There is no one else. We’ve discussed this over and over. You’ve shown no signs of multiple personality or other dissociative illness. As for the twins—it could have happened to anyone. Certainly there’s a genetic propensity for having twins, but this—this is a complete anomaly.”

  “There is no anomaly.” I pushed the tray away. “I am passing down my genetic defect.”

  “You aren’t a twin, Julia. You never were. You’re being unbearably neurotic about the whole thing.”

  He stood up and looked out the window. His dismissiveness shocked me even as it was predictable in some way. He hadn’t believed me up until this point; why would he believe me now?

  “I’m going to die, Michael.” I grabbed the edge of my sheets, a sweat breaking over me. “The opportunity has presented itself. It’s Julie-Ann’s time now.”

  “Look.” Michael was at my side, patting my hand. “I know how incredibly traumatizing this is for you, Jul, but you are going to be fine. They’re going to do surgery tomorrow, and I’ll take care of you and you’ll recover and it’ll be fine.”

  “Bollocks, Michael—you think you know everything.”

  “What?” He stepped back, slightly hunched as if digesting some indiscernible horror. I suddenly wanted to laugh at him, loud and boisterous, and wipe that fucking smirk off his boring old fucking face.

  “You’re right, Michael.” I shook my head. I couldn’t spend my last night with him fighting. It could not be how I was remembered. I took his hand and held it to my face, washing his fingertips with my tears. “I’m just so tired and cranky.”

  When I woke up from the surgery I felt lighter, emptier, awash in a haze of partially numbed pain.

  “Hi, honey.” I saw her husband standing over me, a soft look on his face. He reached to touch my shoulder. I was too groggy to pull away. “You did so well. You’re going to be OK.”

  “The children?” I managed. Although I hadn’t wanted them, I know that she had, and to be honest, I would have raised them for her, no questions asked. With him? Certainly not. I couldn’t stand that smug, elitist bastard, and I never did understand what she saw in him.

  “We can try again, Jul—or we can always adopt.” His hand touched my forehead. “Just rest, sweetheart. We’ll talk more when you’re feeling better.”

  Yes, I needed my strength.

  The fourth night I persuaded Mike to go home. He needed a shower; he needed to get back to work, and I needed to get away. I slipped on the frumpy clothes in which I had arrived to the hospital, rummaged through her purse to make sure that I had coins for the tube, and walked out of the hospital into that good night.

  You think that I am callous; that I don’t care that she’s not here anymore. That’s not true at all. I miss her terribly. I will be mourning her for the rest of my life. And maybe she’s not gone. Maybe she’s somewhere deep in there. And maybe when she’s strong enough or brave enough she will re-emerge, a phoenix among the ashes, and stuff me back into the peanut can like the coiled paper snake that I am.

  But it’s my time now. And I have to make the best of it. Life is short—we know that old adage. For me, life is even shorter.

  I do not know where I am going quite yet. Perhaps London—it is easy enough to disappear in such a large city. Except many of her colleagues teach at universities there—I doubt we’d run in the same circles, but maybe we’d pass on the tube, at the Indian market, at the park, and they’d squint and say Julia, where have you been? Michael’s a complete wreck, and I’d chuckle a bit and say Funny, you know I get that quite a lot, but I’m not her, the girl you always say I am. I’m Julie Ann. Sorry. And that’s where our story ends, I suppose. And mine begins.

  THE BODY

  THE BODY WAS DRESSED IN JEANS and a grubby blue t-shirt whose collar was stained dark with blood. Lincoln viewed it from the ground, where she had tripped over it while making her way through the thick underbrush. A strange, red ogre stared at her, for the face had been mauled, beaten in, as if someone had poked their fingers into a ball of Play-Doh. She could faintly smell blood, bitter like a bucket of rusty nails in water, and rot. She reached to touch the face, slowly, but as she was about to make contact with a congealed mass where the body’s right eye socket should have been, a twig snapped somewhere in the distance, and she sprang up and ran back to the trailer park, wrestling with branches and coiled vines and other foreign arms grabbing for her.

  Lincoln had assumed she was the only one who inhabited those woods. The brush and trees had grown so thick and dark it was hard for even her lithe, twelve-year-old body to snake through the path she had created over months of exploration. It was her private fortress, a fortress that buffered her from the sound of arguments and the smell of overflowing ashtrays and Coors Light and the sweaty, dank smell of Harmon when he spent nights with Lincoln’s mother. In a small clearing by an anemic stream, Lincoln would enact scenes of knights and princesses like those she read about in King Arthur, but could not tell the other kids at school because it made her seem kind of immature when she should be stealing her mother’s lipstick and trying to talk to boys during lunch.

  The body—was it someone she might have known? There were many characters who swept in and out of the trailer park, boyfriends and drug dealers of some of the women who lived there. These women had the weight of children gathered around them like moths—children who cried, wanted, needed those dim blue flames that lit up only when the women smoked. Men like Harmon, shiftless but virile, lethargic but prone to rage. Dark shadows that moved quickly over the sun in random sequences.

  What there is to know about Lincoln’s body: it is twelve; it attends Parkvale Junior High School; it wears a size six jeans and size five sneakers; it has a scar on its right shoulder where she fell off the dining room chair as a child and nicked the corner of the table; it has faint, pale pubic hair that matches her head hair. It has inherited an autosomal-dominant gene for breast cancer from her mother. There is a constellation of moles on her left arm that make her look as if she has freckles.

  “You been out in those woods again, Lincoln?” Her mother appeared in the doorway of her room. Her body was faded, shapeless in some way, like an erased form that still clung defiantly to the paper. A single line composed her, a frown that began at her lips and drooped around her small breasts and growing hips and feet that pointed outward, like a duck’s.

  “No, Momma,” Lincoln answered from the card table on which she did homework.

  “Your shoes got all kinds of crud all over them.” Lincoln’s mother tossed the sneakers into the middle of the room. “You clean these up with the hose and don’t ever come into the house with them that dirty again, you hear me?”

  “Yes, Momma,” Lincoln answered. She picked them up and inspected them after her mother had left. She thought she could detect the faintest trace of blood on them. Or maybe it was something else. She smelled them, her nose deep in the rubber. She smelled grass and earth but not that tinny scent. But maybe something, something that smelled of flesh, decay…something. She took them out to the back and shot the hose at them with such force they lurched over on their sides, the waterlogged laces dancing lethargically in the gathering pool of water.

  The next afternoon, the body was still motionless, a carelessly discarded toy. Lincoln pressed the body with a large branch, succeeding in turning it on its side. She examined the stewed face, soft and red and purple like a bruised, poked fruit, the slight stubble that had been growing that morning or afternoon in which its movement had been halted. She wondered whether the body’s razor still lay b
y a sink somewhere beside waxed, hard soap streaks on a porcelain sink. Did the razor still wait for this face, for contact with this skin?

  The razor would not know, of course, that the body was not coming back that day. Would someone? She had watched the news after dinner last night, sandwiched between Harmon and her mother on a couch that took up most of the main room of the trailer. Two bedrooms, a closet of a bathroom, an eat-in kitchen sandwiched it. Harmon had been drinking a beer, running his finger up and down the sweaty can absently, in a way that made her shudder. Her mother smoked a cigarette, her breaths heavy, and wet between drags.

  “Whaddya you care about the news all of the sudden, Lincoln?” Harmon had asked. When Harmon was at the trailer, he asked all the questions while her mother breathed, or sighed, her formless shape a cloud that hovered behind them, threatening rain.

  “School project,” Lincoln had muttered.

  “About time you learned about the world, all the shit that’s going on it,” he said, taking a long swig. “You ain’t a child no more.”

  The body had begun to settle, like a house, a deflating balloon. Lincoln placed her hand on the hard, cold chest, a mannequin’s chest, a lifesaving dummy like the ones in which she practiced CPR at the high school in the summer. It was broad but sunken, unlike Harmon’s chest, which was muscled and fat all at once. When Lincoln first learned about her body, it was in health class last year. The boys and girls had separate classes, and Lincoln, along with the other girls, learned about the changes her body would experience in puberty. Her breasts would ripen, like peaches or perhaps pears, hair would begin to grow in places it hadn’t before, she would get her period and fully experience, eventually, the sole purpose of her body: to procreate.

  Lincoln would stand in front of the mirror in the closet-sized bathroom of the trailer examining herself, pressed against lotions and perfumes and other things her mother used to hide her real scents and attract men like Harmon. But shouldn’t the real scents be enough? Lincoln had always wondered. Why confuse a mate with foreign scents of jasmine, gardenias? And why did Lincoln have so many thoughts, thoughts about the world and love and unhappiness, if all she were, as the other girls snickered, were just a body, a baby-making machine?