The Elementals Read online

  Pierre said, “You always know when it’s right.”

  I didn’t argue with her.

  I loved her right away.

  It reminded me of how I felt when I met John, Tania and Perry. Except different. This was love without any attachment, therefore without any real risk. I wanted to be near Pierre and Michelangelo but not really involve myself with them. I wanted to feel their quiet presence as they drew on large pieces of paper on the floor of the living room, collected eggs and picked vegetables, ate their omelets and homegrown tomatoes at the kitchen table, sang each other songs at bedtime. In the first few weeks we shared meals and occasionally Pierre and I shopped at the Co-op together. She suggested foods and supplements to add to my diet—like flax oil, probiotics and a green powder to make smoothies with. But often I shopped and ate alone in my room and I was content.

  I was taking classes and doing art projects in my spare time. The collages I’d started to make were really all for Jeni. I got large black poster boards from the art supply store and glued on photographs, then decorated them with ripped pieces of fabric from dresses I’d worn, with glitter and dried petals, safety pins, plastic insects and tea sets. I used the collection of greeting cards my mother had given me over the years—paintings of fairies and dancers and angels and flowers and reproductions of great works of art—as well as a few photographs of my mom, of Jeni and of John. With a silver pen I wrote bits of my stories and poetry on paper that I then ripped and scattered over the surface of the collages. In one piece I used matchboxes with tiny white plastic skeletons inside of them and covered the whole thing with black tulle and black glitter. Sometimes Michelangelo came into my room and made collages with me. He covered his black poster board with gobs of glue and then sprinkled on white feathers and silver glitter.

  “Angels are stars in the air,” he said.

  “Angels are little boys named Michelangelo,” I told him.

  I didn’t spend time with anyone besides my roommates and in the first few weeks I rarely even saw the people I’d known from before. But when I felt settled I did go to visit Melinda Story.

  During office hours I knocked tentatively on her door. She smiled when she saw me and we hugged. She’d cut off her braid into a short pixie; it made her look even younger than she already did.

  “I was so worried about you,” she said. “But I heard you had come back. How are your classes?”

  I shrugged. “They seem okay. I’m trying to focus on the writing.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. I think you’re so talented.”

  “Portman didn’t really.”

  She gestured for me to come and sit at her desk. The light through the windows of Wheeler had that familiar dusty glow, making dust particles ignite.

  “It can be an old boy’s club around here. They don’t always know how to handle a strong woman.”

  A woman? Was I that? A strong woman? “I don’t feel strong. I’ve been afraid to come back but I had to.”

  Annie’s picture was behind Melinda on the shelf. I hadn’t noticed it there before, facing outward, completely visible to anyone who came through the door.

  “They arrested someone,” I said.

  “They found who did it?” Melinda’s eyes looked rounder than usual.

  “No. They arrested the teacher who escorted them, on something ‘unrelated.’” I made quotation marks in the air. “Child molestation. But they say he’s innocent.”

  “Doesn’t sound clean to me.” As Melinda spoke, Annie’s eyes in the photograph wouldn’t stop watching me. I couldn’t tell if they were challenging or just sad.

  I thought of the homeless woman who had spoken to me when I first came here. You think you’re fine now, she said. But just wait. It gets harder. Then you’ll be transformed. Then you’ll be just like us.

  No one was sure if Kragen had done it. What if it was someone else? What if I found out what happened to Jeni and lost my own soul in the process? Is that what I had been afraid of all this time?

  “I guess in some ways I’m scared to know,” I said. “I almost want it to be him so I can just let it rest.”

  “I get it,” Melinda said. “But it’s better to know. No matter what, it’s better.”

  If I lost my soul in this so-far fruitless searching, perhaps it would be for the best. Who else deserved it but my Jennifer, my friend?

  * * *

  One day Lauren Barnes came up to me, suppressing an embarrassed smile.

  “Where’ve you been?” she asked. “We were worried.” She only looked curious; I had been elevated to the level of prime gossip material.

  “Lauren,” I said calmly. “I’ve just been through what could be described as a fucking nightmare and I’m just now trying to come back here and have a life again.”

  “Wow,” she said. “Chillax. What’s all the attitude?”

  But I went on, ignoring her. “There is no reason for you to treat people the way you do except because of some serious and fucked-up personality disorder. I am hoping that you will refrain from speaking to me again, unless you have something sincerely kind to say. Otherwise I may be forced to hit you in the face.”

  She took a step back and put up her hands but by then I was walking away.

  * * *

  There was one other person from the past that I saw sometimes: Tommy Leeds. He was in my modern art history class. We never said hello but one day he sat next to me for the lecture. He wore eyeliner and his hair was spiked. The plugs in his ears had stretched.

  “Hey,” he said.

  I thought of John Graves and the way he greeted me.

  “Greetings.”

  Tommy gave me a split-second squint of what the fuck and then asked, “How’s it going?”

  I wondered why he wasn’t avoiding me.

  “Okay.”

  “Heard you were in L.A. for a while.”

  I nodded.

  “I’m playing with my band in the city this weekend if you want me to put you on the list,” he said.

  “I thought you thought I was a freak.”

  He grinned. “Do. But I also get that you went through some pretty bad shit with all that.”

  I shrugged. I realized then how desperate I still was for any show of sympathy, anyone who would recognize what I had been through. I accepted his invitation.

  * * *

  Pierre asked me where I was going.

  “You look good,” she told me while she stirred the spaghetti sauce.

  I was wearing eyeliner and lipstick, which I usually avoided now. I’d also had my nose pierced on Telegraph by a jewelry vendor and I’d just switched out the original sterile silver stud for a tiny diamond chip. I thanked Pierre and told her about Tommy.

  “But that’s not who you are really thinking about it, is it?” she said in her dusky voice. I hadn’t told Pierre about John but she’d seen photographs of him in the collages I’d been making.

  “The man with the dark hair, in your art?”

  “Yes.”

  Her gaze was gas-flame blue. “May I ask who he is?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Perhaps you need to find out.”

  * * *

  As I headed for BART I saw the man with the dreads.

  “I was once like you, my friend,” he said. “You could become me easy, walk out into the street covered in hair and filth and people would look at you with disgust, sister, and think you were born like that, that you never were a little child, clean as a small tree, quick as water, bright in the mind and breathing sweetly. When you walk as long as I have you’ll see too much, things you don’t want to see. They can kill your mind, yes they can, kill it dead. I hope I can teach you by who I am. You’ll go like me if you don’t watch your back. Those souls, they keep coming no matter what we do and you will always have to hear them until you or someone, some damn thing else takes your life, but you don’t have to let them make you ill in the in-between.”

  He moved his hands in the air s
o the dirty red poncho he wore gave him a winged look. His eyes were rolled up in his head. “There is a sickness, child. You must put it out.”

  I took BART into the city and came to the club where I’d first met John Graves. I almost wanted to turn back; I hadn’t realized how it would affect me, dizzy me, to be there.

  A sign on a trash bin read: DO NOT PLAY ON OR AROUND. Like a warning about everything.

  Just as I was standing there, beneath the marquee, deciding what to do, I felt a hand on the small of my back and gasped.

  It was Tommy.

  “Hey, come in with us,” he said.

  I followed him through the back entrance into the green room, where the rest of the band was milling around drinking beers.

  “Glad you made it out,” Tommy said.

  I tried to smile at him but the muscles in my face felt weak, unused.

  He offered me a drink and I took it since no one seemed to care. The alcohol went right to my knees at the first sip. I could feel it turning to sweat, later, as I bounced around in front of the speakers, thrashing my body to the music, my ears ringing with pain. My eyes were closed most of the time and every so often I’d open them and think, I might see him. I might see John. But of course he was never there.

  After Tommy’s set he brought me another drink and we watched the second band together. His hand snaked to my lower back, slid up my shirt, and I let it stay there. I thought, I have never fucked anyone else. Actually, I’d never fucked anyone. What I had done with John wasn’t that.

  Maybe I should fuck Tommy Leeds?

  But then I thought of how I had turned down the chance to sleep with John and Tania and Perry and nothing made sense to me. Would that have been more meaningful than sleeping with Tommy Leeds? Of course it would. I loved them, didn’t I? I loved John. Would it have given me “experience”? Yes, but that wasn’t really what I wanted, was it? Would it have made me closer to or farther away from John, closer to or farther from Jeni; that was the real question.

  Tommy leaned jerkily over to me. His breath smelled of beer and his eyes were bloodred, from speed probably—I thought of the Blythe doll by my bed at Pierre’s; I still hadn’t changed her eye color to blue or green, even though it would have appeared much less strange.

  Even this high Tommy looked like a boy whom Jeni and I would have crushed on, like a boy Jeni might get to know on a school trip and agree to meet later, in the night.

  “I have to go,” I said.

  “Wait, man. I wanted to hear if you found out more about what happened with that chick,” he said.

  I turned back and saw a smile like a hand was crawling across Tommy Leeds’s face.

  “What the fuck do you know?” I screamed. My palms contracted into fists and I leaped at him, wanting to slam that smile away.

  “Back off!” In the laser beams of light that burned the air his expression was distorted, grimacing. “I told you I don’t know shit. You need some serious help, man.”

  I felt thick arms gripping. A security guard smelling of cigarettes and menthol dragged me away. I was trying to explain it all to him but the words coming out of my mouth didn’t make any sense. He deposited me on the street in front of the theater. I was too stunned to run off; night had never looked so vast. I leaned against a wall for support, wiping the sweat from my face with my T-shirt, and watched four skinny, decadently dressed kids huddled around a cigarette—two boys, two girls, like a group to which I had once belonged.

  I heard some commotion and turned to see a young man being hoisted out in much the same way I had been. He was holding his glasses, which were broken.

  “Ian?” I said.

  He looked at me curiously and began to laugh in a wheezing way through his nostrils. He had lost a lot of weight and his hair was long and lank with grease.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “Aren’t you the one who wanted to know what they put in that wine?” He stopped laughing and his eyes were suddenly suspicious.

  “Ariel,” I said. “From the dorms.”

  He put his finger to his lips. “It’s a secret,” he said, drawing out the word.

  “But not from me,” I said, with as much authority as I could. “I’m their roommate, remember?”

  He giggled. “Oh yeah. Whatever.” He blinked at me. “Cannabis, ephedra, opium. It’s intense stuff. She gave me a lot of it and now it’s all I think about.”

  Intense stuff was right. Weed, speed, heroin. “Who?” I asked. “Tania?”

  “Ms. De la Torre!” He was laughing again. “She’s a fuckin’ hottie. I’d have done anything she said even without all the soma.”

  “Soma?”

  Ian waved brightly at me, turned and started to stumble away into the darkness. I went after him. “What is soma? Are you talking about Tania’s wine?”

  “Ritual wine,” he corrected me. “Drunk as part of the sacrificial ritual! A substitution for the original psychotropic substance.”

  “It had weed and ephedra? And opium?”

  “Awesome, right?” he said.

  I knew then, in that moment, where I needed to go.

  30. Other magics

  My best friend had vanished into air. My mother had had parts of her body precisely and painfully removed. I had lived for almost a year on flowers, lived with a man I loved, but still didn’t really know, and then I had left him and now I was back, still haunted. Perhaps I was under some kind of spell. Nothing seemed real anyway. So why should I believe what happened that Halloween after I ran into fucked-up Ian at the concert? And why shouldn’t I believe it?

  I wore the dress Tania had given me a year before. I told myself it was because I had no other Halloween costumes but that wasn’t really it—I wanted to relive my experience in the house, so I could understand it better. I wore the fragile dress as I walked up into the hills, in the dark, even though it looked as if rain might soon fall.

  It always surprised me how few people I saw in front of the houses in the hills—as if wealth implied closed doors; in the flatlands there were always kids playing, students riding their bikes, people sitting on lawn chairs, walking dogs. Here it was much more quiet, even on a night when carved pumpkins leered from porches and bowls of candy were just inside the doors. There were hardly even any trick-or-treaters in sight. You wouldn’t have guessed what went on in the house where I had once lived, so maybe there were other magics going on behind these facades, but somehow I doubted it.

  The house with its mess of foliage—the oak trees, the roses, the persimmon and ornamental plum—gave hints of what it held if you looked closely enough.

  The curtains were pulled closed and I couldn’t hear the familiar music coming from within. I stood there a long time before I finally gathered the courage to knock, and then I stood there longer still.

  But no one came.

  Standing there in the rain, I was now sure that it was time for me to visit John. If I could make it to him.

  31. Or the Wilding

  So this is how we run. We run in our pretty clothes, the ones we put on earlier to attract love. We run with our hair streaming out behind us. We run as quietly as possible, so no one hears us.

  But sometimes they hear us.

  It is called the Wild Hunt. When they come for us. Or the Wilding.

  We are girls and women who were out alone, who were out at night, who were not rewarded for being kind to strangers as the fairy tales once taught us. We are girls and women who were unlucky. Sometimes we are boys, too.

  We have no magic powers.

  We have no amulets of protection.

  No one has cut crosses into the stumps of trees to keep us safe.

  Would that even keep us safe?

  We no longer believe in fairy tales.

  But we will learn to believe in monsters.

  * * *

  I ran that night in the rain, away once more from the house I had loved and toward the man who was the reason I had loved it. I ran for Jeni, too, thou
gh I still doubted whether anything I did could help her anymore. As I ran the rainfall grew heavier, drops of water blinded me. Soon it was a storm, roaring in my ears like the voices of giants.

  * * *

  I don’t know if what happened that night really happened to me or how it did, if it did, in spite of the evidence that I would soon hold in my hands. But I could have been feeling so guilty about everything that had gone before—I had let down my mother, then John, and Jeni, always Jeni. Now I was back, maybe stronger, but still running, and perhaps more deranged than ever. Maybe that is why these things happened that night. Or I believed they did.

  * * *

  He was there before I knew as I came down into the flatlands. The car parked blocking my way and the passenger door opened. I slid to a stop. The night was so dark I couldn’t see myself, except the vague glow of my white dress, plastered to my body like the marble folds of a gown on a statue. I was shivering and the car was warm—I remember that. The heater was on in the car and it felt warm compared to the night that shook me.

  A hand. It pushed me down so that my face pressed into the cracked, bristling leather. Smell of cigarettes and mold. I thought, I am going to die.

  I didn’t think to scream. He slammed the door closed and I pushed myself up and grabbed for the handle but it wouldn’t open. My fingers crawled madly over the door panel looking for the lock. Knobs. Buttons. Metal. Darkness. Nothing. But he was in the passenger seat now. He grabbed both my hands in one of his. His hands were that huge. There was a rope in his mouth and he used his other hand to wrap it around my wrists and pull it tight so the braiding burned into my flesh; then he pushed me down on the seat again.

  “Please don’t,” I said. I pressed my face into the upholstery so I couldn’t see his face. “I’m not going to look at you. I’m not going to scream. Just let me go.”

  He was silent. His silence was huge, like his hands. There was something about him that seemed familiar, like a nightmare you’ve had before but can’t remember, like a face on the street you can’t place but that makes your back hollow with fear.

  I knew not to look at him.