The Elementals Read online

  “Greetings,” he said, his eyes lingering for a discreet moment on my breasts.

  I gave him the flower and waited.

  “Come in,” was his only answer to my unspoken question.

  The house felt even more current-filled than the garden; the air seemed to vibrate. There was a large bouquet of white lilies and roses in a glass vase on the table.

  “So you got them,” he finally said.

  “They were from you?” I looked into his eyes for the first time since I’d gotten there. He smiled a small, nervous smile and nodded.

  “Thank you. They’re beautiful.” I looked around the room, wondering where Tania and Perry were, if they’d pop out at any moment.

  John was watching me carefully from a few feet away. Then he came forward, reached out suddenly and grabbed my hand. “Come upstairs,” he said. His voice was a rumble.

  I let him lead me. I wanted the sharp feeling in my chest to go away. I wanted him to make it go away.

  Even as I followed John up the stairs I told myself that I should be doing something else, be back in L.A. spying on Kragen, talking to the cops, tracking down people who had been on the trip with Jeni. But it was pathetic. What did I think I was? Some kind of amateur sleuth trying to investigate what had happened? If so, I had failed miserably so far.

  His room was a low-ceilinged sunporch. Leaves hung over it, casting shadows through the glass panes, branches tapping lightly as if they wanted to get in. Light from many candles shimmered into the illusion of more candles reflected in the glass. We sat on a futon. There was no other furniture except a low lacquered chest with dark flowers painted on it and hundreds of drawers fitted with silver rings.

  “You look so sad,” John said.

  I lowered my eyes. All I could think about was being in my dorm room surrounded by white flowers and my mom’s voice on the phone, fading from me like a ghost.

  I had almost never been away from her, even overnight, for seventeen years unless I was at Jeni’s. Once I had tried to go to sleepaway camp but I had cried so much, paralyzed with loneliness in the dark, that my parents came and got me after two days.

  “May I show you something?” He spoke softly and moved closer, turning so that I could have collapsed against his chest if I let myself. My spine felt weak; I wanted to sink into him.

  He poured a glass of water from a pitcher and held it up to the light, turned it slightly. Clear. Then he pulled a blue silk scarf out of his breast pocket and draped it over the goblet. I sat mesmerized by his hands, his eyes half-closed with concentration. When he removed the cloth red crystals, like pieces of ruby, sparkled at the base of the glass. He passed his hand across it and the glass was filled with red liquid. He handed it to me.

  It smelled like poppies, growing wild on a summer hill. A cold version of the winter brew. I took a sip and every sinew of my being loosened right away.

  “How did you do that?” I asked. This time I wasn’t drunk or high yet; I was sure I’d seen the water transform.

  “Tania showed me some tricks. She’s been studying magic since she was little. Her stepfather taught her.”

  “Lucky.”

  “Not really,” he said. “There was a price.”

  I remembered Tania’s question about sexual abuse. My stepfather.

  “What happened to her?” I asked.

  “What happens to every kid who’s abused, I guess, in one way or another. He lured her in until she trusted him. In this case he used magic tricks. She was just a kid. And then he messed with her.”

  I saw John’s eyes turn hazy, blue-gray dazed, thinking about little-girl Tania being hurt. I felt sorry for her, too, but I wanted him back with me, here.

  “But how did you do it?” I said. “The magic trick.”

  John’s fingers lightly touched my left wrist where Jeni’s bracelet was. He was back with me. “We all have secrets,” he said.

  I tapped him in the same place, where the tattoo was, dark shapes that resembled small hieroglyphs of birds and flowers. I could feel his pulse underneath. “Like this? What does it say?”

  “It’s the name of someone important to me who died.”

  “Can you tell me?”

  “Not now. Someday.”

  Then I was crying, for both of us, the sharp pieces in my chest shaking around. I was afraid they’d cut me. I pressed my face into his chest, spilling a bit of the wine on my T-shirt. He gently took the wine from my hand.

  I heard his voice through my sobs; it seemed he was singing something, some kind of lullaby with words I wanted to possess, like weird gems, but didn’t understand. Through my tears the room glowed like liquid gold.

  When I was quiet again I kept my face against his chest; I could feel his heartbeat. He moved his hands through my hair, gently sliding the ponytail holder off so that the loosened strands spilled down. He played with them, tugging softly, wrapping them gently around the thickness of his fingers. I slumped forward so that our foreheads touched and I heard a soft gasp escape him as I nuzzled my cheek against the scratchy surface of his. My finger found the cleft in his chin; I realized that every time I had seen him I had wanted to do this. Then I pushed my face up like a baby animal so that the tips of our noses touched. In that moment of met cartilage and flesh a squeezing sensation went through my lower body. John’s fingers moved down over my cheekbones, along my neck, explored the beating pool at the base of my throat, the hardness of my clavicle. He slid his hands around behind me and placed his fingers on my shoulder blades, touching the bones reverently, as if he had discovered wings.

  Then John Graves pressed his lips to mine and the veils between this world and the others disintegrated in places, like ancient lace, so that I could glimpse through.

  The other worlds are not something you can describe in regular words. That is why poetry was invented. I can only say I saw golden rooms with vaulted ceilings carved with the faces of madmen. I saw rolling balls of flowers gathering flowers. I saw a woman with eyes like leaves and tendrils of green hair that grew around her body. A river came from her mouth and her hands were on fire. I saw children running through dark streets, shrieking, stumbling, bleeding, and after them came the shuddering crash of hoof-like feet.

  * * *

  Through it all, John Graves held me. And we spoke, too, though I don’t remember exactly what we said. Except at one point I told him what I had seen when he kissed me.

  He held me closer and I felt his heartbeat through the wall of my own chest. “I can’t tell if you are outside of me or inside of me,” was all he said.

  “Where did you come from?” I asked, but I was only partly asking out of suspicion this time. “Did I make you up?”

  He smiled softly—my eyes were closed but I could feel it with my fingers as they traced his mouth. Then he told me the stories.

  His father had met his mother while traveling in Ireland. She was beautiful, much younger than he was. But she never spoke. They married and returned to America, where she got pregnant and gave birth to John, then disappeared.

  Or: he was adopted. He cried at loud sounds and bright lights and refused to drink milk or eat meat or fall asleep without a light on. His parents did not understand him. He left home at seventeen and never saw them again.

  His father beat him. He ran away from home at fourteen and lived on the streets, panhandling, Dumpster diving, reading his poetry in the subways for change. One day a young couple found him, took him home and he never left.

  And the real one, or so it seemed: he was a trust fund baby, like Perry, the youngest of three sons, from one of the Victorian mansions in Pacific Heights. The brothers went to law school and he studied English, wore weird clothes and hung out with Tania and Perry, disappointing his family, who were happy to give him a monthly stipend as long as he didn’t bother them too much with his eccentricities.

  I fell asleep, finally, fully clothed, in the bed of all these different versions of John Graves. Part of me never wanted to awaken and face
the world again.

  * * *

  I did wake, though. It was morning and John lay beside me, reading. He put the book aside but I glimpsed the cover. It said The Philosopher’s Secret Fire. Before I could ask him about it, he brushed the hair out of my eyes with the tips of his fingers.

  “How did you sleep?” he asked. Sun filtered through the glass walls of the room, touched a crystal on a low shelf and scattered rainbow prisms on the floor. I stretched my body; it felt as if I had permanently gained an inch.

  “Mmm. Babylike,” I hummed. “You?”

  He shook his head. “I’m a night owl.”

  I let my fingers catch his shirt collar and stroke his Adam’s apple. His cheeks were rough with whiskers. I liked how they grew over the cleft in his chin, not obscuring it yet. “Doesn’t that get difficult sometimes?”

  “Only if I have to get up early. People ask me how I can be in relationships with anyone who doesn’t stay up but it’s easy, really. You can watch over each other. If someone wakes with a nightmare, the other person is always there.”

  I pulled him back down and pressed my nose into the pit of his arm. He smelled strong, musky. I breathed deeply.

  “You had a nightmare, you know?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t remember.”

  “You cried out. You were waving your hands around, like warding something off.”

  “What did I say?” I asked, not really wanting to know.

  “Ariel, you said her name.”

  I covered my face with my hands. I had let too much time go by without thinking of her. She was reminding me of this.

  “If you want we can help you look,” he said. “We can look for clues.”

  I curled up against his warmth and silently thanked him.

  He kissed the top of my head. “Do you know it’s eight?” he said gently.

  “Oh my god, I have to leave.” I forced myself to get up and put on my shoes.

  “May I take you home?” he asked.

  “No, you rest. You must be tired, night owl.”

  “Ariel?”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for letting me watch over you.”

  In spite of the dream, in spite of everything, a warmth filled my center, like the sun pouring into the room, spreading out through my veins into my fingers and toes. “Thank you, John Graves. Someday I will do the same for you.”

  I did not run that time, even though I was going to be late to class. I walked down through the North Berkeley hills among the maple and oak and lemon trees, past the houses with their rambling gardens, though none that rambled down into flowery grottoes like John’s. I could smell a sweetness in the air as if spring was finally calling to me from across the expanse of too many terrible autumns.

  He will help me find you, I promised her.

  17. The city that already looked like a place you would go after you died

  After that, everything was different. Was it the kiss? I only knew that I felt the warmth in my body, the warmth that had begun in John’s room, all the time. I read and wrote effortlessly. All my senses seemed to have sharpened but the experience was not painful as it had been before. The brightness of the light no longer hurt my eyes and the sound of the leaves soothed me with their songs. I could smell John Graves on my clothes and in the wind. I could taste him when I ate. I felt my hands becoming his hands when I stroked myself beneath my blankets in the night.

  But this only lasted for a week.

  Then I began to go through withdrawals. My skin twitched; it only smelled of me. I palpated my lower belly where the strange marks reminded me of his presence. I sniffed the shirt I’d worn on Valentine’s and, though I hadn’t washed it, I couldn’t smell John there, either, anymore. Food lost its taste and my tongue felt coated, almost furred. I wore sunglasses all the time during the day and even thought of getting earplugs to keep the whisperings of the natural world from agitating me. The winged woman and her companion seemed to be waiting for me on every street corner. The dreadlock man wore branches in his hair like antlers. Every time I left a class my heart beat faster, hoping John was waiting there. I remembered a poem my mother read to me as a child, Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market,” where a young girl eats the forbidden goblin fruit and must be rescued from death by her sister.

  I was that addicted; I needed the goblin fruit of John Graves’s kiss.

  Did I want it more than I wanted to search for Jeni? I certainly didn’t want it more than to find her, but to search, not knowing what I would find? There was no escape in that. The question haunted me and maybe it was one reason I didn’t go to the house. Besides, it seemed pathetic for me to show up again. He had come to me once, I told myself; he would come back.

  But I did wonder why I felt so compelled to be near him and one day in the laundry room, about to throw in the T-shirt I’d worn to John’s on Valentine’s Day, I noticed a stain on the fabric. From the wine he’d given me. I remembered something then, something Coraline Grimm had said to me when I found her putting up missing-person flyers in her room.

  There’s some weird shit in that drink they serve.

  Yes, John, Tania and Perry were beautiful and enticing and seductive but when I left them I felt more obsessed than seemed appropriate, even for me in my strange state. I threw the stained shirt back in the hamper.

  * * *

  I found Ian Larsen in his dorm room. Luckily Tommy wasn’t there; I wasn’t up to seeing him or having to explain why I was coming to see his roommate.

  “You’re Ian, right?”

  He nodded, watching me shyly behind his glasses. His hair was standing up in back. The origin of the term cowlick had never seemed so clear.

  “I’m Ariel.”

  He nodded. “Hey. What’s up?”

  “Are you a biochem major?”

  “Yeah.” He seemed pleased I knew. Lauren had mentioned it in some freak/geek reference about badly matched roommates and how Ian could bust Tommy with a urine sample if they got into something.

  “If I gave you a sample. Of an alcoholic drink? But it’s just a stain on a shirt. Could you test it for me?”

  He didn’t look at me like I was crazy so I took the shirt out of my bag and handed it to him.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “Just this drink I had at a party. Do you think you could test it for me? I’d pay you.”

  He shook his head. “No, I’ll do it for you. What am I looking for?”

  “Something to make you hallucinate, something addictive.”

  He nodded. “Cool.”

  “Not really. But the alternative is even more fucked up.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Magic. Insanity.”

  “Cool,” he said.

  * * *

  A few days later Ian texted me: grapes sugar yeast pectin. It was hard to believe that there wasn’t more in that wine. It meant I was jonesing for John, just John, not something he’d given me. I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  * * *

  I was coming home from the library late one night when I noticed a large white car parked in front of my dorm. The car was ungainly, finned and familiar. I stopped and stared at it.

  Tania leaned her head out of the passenger seat window. “Sylph!” she cried.

  I was overcome with longing, then, and not just for John—for his kisses and his wine—but for Tania, and Perry, too. Even for their tests. I wanted to prove myself; I wanted to take off my clothes and have them look at me again.

  But instead of moving toward the car, I took a step back and hugged my poetry books to my chest like a shield of words.

  “Don’t be scared,” said Tania.

  Perry poked his head out of the backseat. His grin reminded me of the crescent moon dangling mischievously in the sky.

  “Hi, Ariel,” John said from the front. “It’s the equinox.”

  I could only see him vaguely in the darkness, lit by the streetlamps. His strong face with the almost severe
cheekbones and chin. I couldn’t see his eyes at all.

  “We’re going to the city to celebrate,” said Tania. “Come with us!”

  I hesitated and looked up at the dorm. I could make out my room from below. The light was on; Lauren and Dallas must be there. I didn’t want to go back.

  Tania climbed into the back as John jumped out, wearing a vintage smoking jacket and ascot, came around and held the door open for me gallantly, with his head bent.

  “Please join us,” he whispered. And then, just in case I wasn’t yet convinced, he added, “I may have someone who can help. With your friend.”

  That was all it took. I slid onto the cracked leather seat, sawdust poking through.

  “To Elfland,” Tania said as John started the car.

  The bridge glowed like the Milky Way as we rode it into the city. Tania handed me a large box from the backseat. Then she sat back, stretching out her bare, shiny legs in the gold stilettos across the seat between me and John.

  “The only catch is you have to change now,” she said. Her eyes were catlike in the hazy mist-glow of the city light.

  Well, I would be getting naked again after all. But I wanted to please her. Maybe they really did have some clue about Jeni? I frowned at Tania and opened the box. Inside, among layers of Tiffany-blue tissue, was a dress of thin cream-colored satin with small roses adorning the draping fabric.

  “Put it on,” Perry said. “We won’t look.”

  He and Tania giggled. John was staring straight ahead, his large hands firmly on the wheel, his shoulders a little hunched. I wanted to show them I wasn’t scared. As we drove I unbuttoned my flannel shirt and took it off, slipped the fragile dress over my head. It was too dark in the car for any of them to see the marks that were still on my abdomen. With the dress on, I unbuttoned my jeans and wriggled out of them. Tania whistled softly and handed me a second box with a pair of cream-colored lace-up boots in it. I busied myself with putting them on so I wouldn’t have to think about either her or the men looking at me. Although John wasn’t looking. He still stared ahead of him and I saw the sweat on his temples. I wondered if he had told Tania and Perry about this person who might be able to help with Jeni.