A little ink more or less

7.

Last night I dreamed again of being lost — lost so deep beneath that I didn’t even know where I’d come from, who I was — and I didn’t care. It was a dream of that sort I remember noting as a girl — the dream that begins in progress, but unlike novels might do, there are no subsequent flashbacks, no ruminatory expositions — only a sense of the past having happened in order to put forth the present. The question, of course, is always — is the elision the dream’s doing, or that of memory? Did we in fact dream the beginning? Has memory hidden it from us? Or did we dream in motion, as though landing from a great height and tumbling with the force of it?

It was at that age that I was so fond, as girls are, of the phrase “I would rather die.” I had no idea what that meant, of course — we girls of that age, oh we never did. It was drama, and it was my first love, never you, Michael, never you if you’ll forgive me that. All the great people died, after all, all the very very best people, so naturally I wanted to — naturally! It was so sweet, like a perfect berry, cold and trembling and full of wet. I would lay still sometimes, on my bed, testing out the poses I thought I might wish people to see me in at my wake. I would hold my breath for as long as I could, hoping my lips would turn blue, wondering how skin felt different after death, hoping someone would walk into my bedroom and see me, mistake me for dead.

I dreamed last night I was lost, but not trapped — the difference is so much, so much, the difference between sleeping and laying down. They are associated with one another, but they are not the same. People think of being lost, and they think of, I don’t know, they think of having mixed up their roads in a visiting city, and forgetting which way they came — they think of being somewhere they do not know how to leave, and their ignorance keeps them there. But we are lost from birth — we do not know where we are, and must constantly learn it — but certainly would not, could not, try to find our way “back,” because there is nowhere to which to return. Being lost can mean being hidden — like the “lost world” of that book you liked, Michael, and the “lost continent” I see in so many of those magazine stories — the world, the continent, does not forget where it is, and to return elsewhere is not an option — but it is lost all the same.

Being lost is not the same thing as being trapped. Being lost can be — should be — has been for me — the most wonderful, thrilling thing in the world — as we speak of losing ourselves in sex — we say we lose ourselves to God — we become lost in the moment –

You are only trapped if you want to leave.

M.

Castle tapped a finger against the book as he read it, frowning to himself, and when he finished the first entry — if that’s what it was — he pushed it aside, so he wouldn’t spill coffee on it. It was old — for all he knew it was valuable, an antique, who knew. No reason to ruin it, in any case.

He couldn’t tell if it was a journal — and the addresses to “Michael” just apostrophe or synecdoche or whatever it was called — or if it was a very long letter. Maybe she’d copied a letter into her diary. He had no idea if women did that kind of thing, or had in the past. He really should watch more Lifetime.

Carefully glued, though, to the bottom of the page that ended that first entry, was a faded yellow photograph of Domino. It must have been fifty years old: the back lawn looked different, and judging from the distance from which the photograph seemed to have been taken, the trees which now bordered the lawn hadn’t yet been transplanted. Maybe it was before the neighbors’ houses squeezed up against the ribbon of land which led down to the beach that technically belonged to him now, even if he could never see it.

He flipped through the rest of the book. More entries in that same handwriting, methodically and evenly done. Photos pasted in here and there, along with ribbons, coins, and other odds and ends. Like a, what you call, a hope chest in book form. Except he wasn’t totally sure what girls put in their hope chests, either. Did they even still have them? He remembered them from the Brady Bunch, mostly.

Katrine wasn’t there for him to ask — she’d left after blowing him and would be back the next night. He had the rest of the day and night to himself, and now that he’d come, the idea of bringing in another hooker to have dinner with didn’t appeal as much. He killed an hour by going through the mail and the books Ted had sent, laying them, the rest of the mail, and the singleton books from the living rooms all out on the dining room table, after removing all the removable leaves from it so he could push it smaller, use it as a sort of second desk. Well, fourth desk if you counted the two upstairs.

So spread out before him, he had books about ghosts, poltergeists, bad vibes, Amityville, a burned-out haunted house in New Orleans, the curses of Poltergeist and Tutankhamen, demonic possession, “psychic phenomena of Manitoba,” the Mothman, and a crosscultural encyclopedia of spiritual beliefs pertaining to the dead. When you threw in the diary and the Alice book, that made thirteen total, which was a lot of reading. He brewed a strong pot of coffee, emailed an order for espresso beans while he was thinking of it, and sat down to dig in.

The books ranged from dog-eared mass-market paperbacks with vague cover illustrations — things he’d take for John Saul knock-offs if he didn’t know better — to coffeetable editions with eighty percent photo, twenty percent text. Some of them were from large publishing houses — he was a shareholder in two of them — and others were from university presses, small presses, or in the case of the possession book, someone’s laserjet printer.

All of which made him keep wanting to ignore them, since it was the Alice book that drew his eye.

The illustrations in it were amateurish, but not bad, and the text was hand-written — hand-printed. No mention of the artist — nor the author, although he assumed it was Lewis Carroll. The story seemed the same as Alice in Wonderland, and he would’ve just figured they changed the title for the movie, except he knew he’d read the book as a kid, and loved it. So he hauled one of the laptops in to his new makeshift work area, and typed a few passages here and there into Google.

Boop, there it was:

“Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. The original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, printed as a gift for Alice Liddell, before Lewis Carroll (real name Charles Dodgson) was convinced to publish it, which he eventually did under the familiar title, with editorial changes. A facsimile of the manuscript — complete with Carroll’s own illustrations — was released in 1912, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the boat trip on which Carroll had first told Alice the story of her fictional doppelganger. This short-run release was autographed on the final page by Liddell, who by then had married and become Alice Hargreaves, but remained a minor celebrity because of her connection to the beloved story.”

And sure enough, on the last page, there was Alice’s graceful scrawl.

That had to make this pretty valuable, then. The only copies on Ebay were of later, more recent reprints, long after both Carroll and Liddell were dead. Checking other sites — he wasn’t an expert at this, so checked auction sites he’d used from time to time to pick up rare gifts, and googled the rest — it was hard to get a fix, because too many of the used bookstores just listed the condition, not the year of release. Of course, this edition didn’t have a year of release indicated on the volume itself, so … yeah.

Either way: it wasn’t cheap. Why keep it in the living room? Had it been there since it was new? A lot of the other books were old, too, roughly contemporary if he had to guess — within a couple decades, anyway — but as far as he knew, they weren’t collectors’ items. Maybe he should have them appraised. That was the responsible thing to do.

He clicked through the phonebook in his cell to dial Jonathan, and then hit end instead. Why go through Jonathan? He could hire an appraiser himself. There was no reason to get Mr Senator in the mix.

After the housing inspector had come and gone, then.

He read the first few pages of Under Ground, and it didn’t seem different from the one he remembered. Maybe the wording had changed. Alice got bored with her sister, followed a rabbit down a hole, went underground to Wonderland. Something about it — the hand printing, the thick paper, the underlining for emphasis instead of italics or capitals — made it easy to imagine it being read aloud, and the tones of voice that would be used. It was comforting, somehow.

Maybe the owners of the book — this M., this Michael? were they also the Vander whatevers who had all the boxes upstairs? was the diary-writer necessarily the diary-owner? — had had kids.

He put it aside for the moment, and flipped through the diary. There was a photo of the diary-writer, a large one taking up most of the page, pasted in about two-thirds of the way through.

“Wow,” he murmured to himself. She was hot. Maybe hot wasn’t the right word — not sexy, either — not glamorous, the way most women he saw were in photographs this old, since most of them were actresses. But beautiful, certainly. Striking. She drew the eye.

She had a heart-shaped face, he guessed it was called, if you rounded off the bottom “tip” of the heart. Large, dark eyes that looked like they were peering out from under something even though there was nothing to peer from, and a cruel, pouting, lovely mouth. Her hair was in what he guessed must be a bob — short, wavy in a way that clearly she hadn’t been born with, dark and glossy. Those eyes, though, that’s what got your attention — the eyes and the mouth, both of them dark. Reminded him of Cleopatra for some reason, even though she wasn’t wearing any visible eye makeup (although her lips must have been lipsticked).

Or maybe it was the expression. A neutral one, an “I’m having a photo taken” one, but somehow — something about her face — it was like she looked fourteen and forty at the same time. He was never good at guessing age from black and white photographs, and in this case he’d say older than 20, younger than 35. The smoothness of her face gave her an almost ageless quality, as though it could have come either — or equally — from being untouched, or worn off.

“I looked like this once,” she’d written above the photograph, and beneath it, “Would you love me if I did not?”

And on the next page, opposite it:

I hear such noises at night. How am I ever to sleep with such noises? They wake me up suddenly — I hear them every time I turn around, it seems — as though I’m followed — as though they come down through the walls — and the visions they give me, the images in my head, you know I cannot stand them, you know what I have done to myself before in trying to rid myself of them, how can you permit me to suffer such things, O Michael my darling? How can we continue to live in this house? Do you not know what it does to me? Do you not see?

Why has it been so long since you have come to my bed and comforted me?

#

I wish I were a man, I wish I were a man, I wish I were a man, that I could do to her what I wish YOU to do to her. Or do I want YOU to be HER, and for ME to be you? Perhaps I want to be lost again, Michael, none of us knowing who or what or where we are, instead of wondering only why.

I wish I were a man, O my lover, so I could wrestle you to the ground without your worrying of hurting me, twist you and force you and mold you into hot panic so that you lash back at me, you finally relax yourself and unleash, like a spring too long coiled.

I wish I were a man, mine own my only, and if I were, I would not cower here in bed, with the sheets curled up around me, the journal upon the endtable as I write with one hand and pleasure myself with the other, legs bare and fingers busy beneath the bedclothes. No, were I a man, I would display my pleasure as often as I pleased, letting it bulge in my trousers — it must be so huge, so distracting, as it rises there! so rude and consuming! — and I would unbutton them, and with a few cold strokes I would spill my displeasure upon the floor, and have you lick it away until the wood shone.

I wish I were a man, Michael, that I might kill you kindly. But I am not, and I remain,

your only, your alone, your entire

Mia.

#

My Goofo, my darling,

You must come see me. Oh, you must. I did not mean to anger you. I did anger you, didn’t I? When I wanted — and what I wanted — and oh. Oh, you take me far too seriously. You love me far too carefully.

Come back, please. Abandon foul Paris, with its stinking rivers and fetid cities. Come back to me, come back to Domino. Dom dom dom dom Domino, Domino Domino, Domino dear. Without you, I am like a wet paperdoll that will dissolve at the wrong touch.

your own, your desperate

M.

#

If only,

My dear Michael,

If only I could make you hate, the way I have made you love. If only I could make you hate, the way I make you come. Straddle you, and throttle you with my thighs, and make you burst with outrage, as I can only think you must. It makes me so c-r-a-z-y when you fail to see the world as I tell it to you! There is none so blind, et cetera.

But that is not what I meant to write to you. Every time I pick up the pen, words rush out of it, and they are not always mine — and how I hate them, as I copy them, how I hate them and hate you and hate her and oh oh how I hate, can you possibly know the taste of it? oh Michael oh fool oh darling hate — when what I want are words of love.

You are beside me even now, in our bed, as I write this. I can feel the side of your leg against mine, and the perhaps five inches square of touching skin to skin, cool and soft and baby-like. Do you remember As You Like It? The play? “No sooner met, they looked — no sooner looked, they loved.”

Thank you for no sooner looking, my darling.

I love these velvet nights and I am

your love, your tragical mirth, your

Mia.

#

My darling Michael,

I hate you sometimes, so much, and I know I say that often — to myself, to you, in letters, in the heat of passion — but you must know that it’s only because of the strength of our love. I get confused sometimes, I know that — but Michael dear Michael don’t hold it against me. I hate it when we quarrel like this. I hate it when you won’t speak to me. I hate it when I don’t know if you’re reading my letters or burning them unread.

I wonder, do you save them? Do you treasure them? Do you remember my words, or only my sentiment? Or do you only scan them quickly, looking for “facts” — for “information” — for the hard, the solid — as you would the front page of the Hearts paper, while smoking your pipe and complaining about yellow journalism? I often think men and women are different in this regard — that a man notices first what is said, and a woman how it was said.

Perhaps I should send the letters to her as well, and see how the two of you react differently?

Would you like that, Michael?

Will you put me away forever, or will I be like a Christmas toy, to be kept in the closet except for those times once or twice a year when you bring me out to play with, to remind yourself I belong to you? Never to be given away, never to be thrown out, but never to be loved, either. Always outgrown, never forgotten.

I hate you because I’ll always let you do it.

Mia.

#

Goofo,

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the black and wonder if you still look the way you remember? In the dark there are no mirrors, only cold glass. You can picture yourself only clothed in the words others have used to describe you, and for a woman, this is a terrible thing: in my mind, I give myself kind cruel wet sad gleeful eyes, and a dark sensual child’s mouth, the hair of unruly angels, and smooth petal skin as warm as stone. Those are the moments when I feel the heat boiling up in me, and I cannot help it, I often try to make myself cry but soft, and when I fail, that is when I call out for you.

I am very sorry. Please do not be cross.

Only, you must come to me, and tell me what I’m like. You must remind me of myself, Michael, you must bring me myself, please, I beg of you. I ask so little of you, and I know, you have given me Domino, I should be grateful for it, but please oh please, I have given you so much, so much my lord, so much.

your always,

your

Mia.

#

He fell asleep with the diary drooping out of his hand, Mia’s handwriting running together in his head. He’d skimmed through Teddy’s books, ditching the ones that seemed useless and making note of which sections of the others to reread more closely, and then dipped again into Mia’s book. Bits were nearly incoherent, glazed over with secret references he could only haphazardly guess at. Other parts made her sound unstable or worse.

The part about licking come off the floor? That was as clear as it was inexplicable. Despite Teddy’s books, despite the spook he’d gotten in the basement, he wasn’t ready to think of the house as haunted. Not in the “oooh, ghosts, oh no” sense, but he wasn’t sure yet what other sense there might be.

As he drifted off, in that vague middle distance where he was still thinking about what he was reading, repeating phrase after phrase to himself, without actively doing so anymore, it seemed to him that the entries weren’t written in order. That didn’t make any sense unless she had copied letters into the diary — but even copying them in out of order implied that she had them, and how often — back before word processors and computer copies — did people have copies of the letters they’d sent? Perhaps if Michael were her husband.

Some of the letters seemed strange things to write to a man you lived with. Some of them sounded like she didn’t live with him at all; others asked him to come home. Maybe he left on business a lot — maybe he’d gone to war — maybe, like Castle’s family, they had multiple homes and didn’t always cohabitate them — maybe the letters were from both before and after marriage.

The last thing he thought before he fell asleep was that he should ask Reynolds about the previous owners.

When he woke up, it was so abruptly that he didn’t know what had woken him: the bedside light still glaring, having left him with one of those headaches you get when you drift to sleep in the bright, or the scratching noises coming from downstairs. Not even downstairs, maybe: they sounded like they were coming from the staircase, the one on the “wrong” side of the house, the reflection side.

Like the way a cat or dog sounds when it’s scratching on a door to try to reach under it. Scritch-scritch, scritch-scritch, over and over again, slow but unsubtle.

He lay in bed listening to it, trying at first to convince himself that he was still half-asleep and dreaming, and then to ascribe the noise to some other source: a windstorm, trees, passing traffic, something on the lake. No luck. Of course, it was probably only a rat, or the stray cat that might be trapped in the house, or something else innocuous.

Hell, he told himself. Even if it’s a ghost, a fucking ghost … it’s just scratching on the stairs. What the hell is dangerous about that? How is that threatening? It’s three steps down from the kid who used to flick wads of paper at the back of your head in third grade math class.

Which meant he had to get up and check it out. The floor creaked when he stepped out of bed — it sounded so much louder at night, as if the day were filled with a sort of dampening ambient noise that he never noticed nor contributed to — and again with every step. When he reached the hallway, the scratching seemed to respond to his steps.

Creak-scritch.

Creak-scritch.

By the time he got to the staircase, it didn’t seem to be coming from there anymore. He flicked the lightswitch on, feeling ridiculous for thinking as he did so, I hope I don’t startle it — as though he didn’t want Whatever It Was to know he was there.

He walked down the stairs, which wound downwards in a reflection of the ones on the proper side of the house, the master copy so to speak, and the scratching continued — no louder than before, no more eerie, still very much like a cat reaching its paw under a door and trying to pry it open or reach at something it could barely spy.

The stairs flowed into a den, and the light was just enough for him to see into it, and for his eyes to follow his ears to where the scratching seemed to come from. And he saw it for a moment — not clearly, only a sense of motion, of something crooked moving in time to the scratching noise, right before it stopped.

But then, as his eyes adjusted to the dim, the scratching stopped altogether: and he realized he was looking at the mirror, and that the movement he’d caught a glimpse of was from far behind his reflection, above him on the backwards stairs. There was nothing there, as he knew there wouldn’t be, when he turned around to try to go back to sleep.