Brooke Juliet Wonders
1. Paper cutout of a red dress. Heart-shaped key. Papier-mâché pomegranate. Bronze hooks.
He's not in need of a next wife, but one finds him anyway. She won't look at him directly. Instead she stares at his shoulders, his neck, the wall behind the bar. He can't tell if she's shy or coy or smart enough to know better. Perhaps some other girl has warned her—the bartender, perhaps? He is a regular.
She sits two stools down from him nursing a gin and tonic he bought her. When her glass is empty, she'll take his heart-shaped key. He feels for her; he'd postpone that moment too, if he were her. She's wearing a skintight red dress that reminds him of his fourth wife's favorite lipstick and his twelfth wife's short hair. Truthfully, red reminds him of all his wives.
"Let me tell you a fairytale," he says, sliding a key down the bar and into her waiting hand, "about my past."
"You think those are two different things," she says. Still she won't meet his gaze. "You're so funny," she says, neither smiling nor laughing. He's learned that when a woman says you're funny, what she means is I'm frightened.
He won't let her get away. The next time her black eyes dart his direction, he grabs her chin, and she says it again, "What a funny man you are," before tossing her hair to shake him off. To reassure her, he pulls down his collar just enough to reveal the heart-shaped lock above his clavicle.
When he leaves, she trails behind him like a wish.
"You forgot this," she says, but he won't let her press the key into his dry-knuckled hand.
He knows they all expect a torture chamber, but when she steps into his apartment, tentative as a doe (did she really say her name was Bambi?), it's bare as winter branches. There's a saw, sure, but that's left over from when he installed built-in bookshelves. There are tongs and scissors, a nail gun and an array of knives, but that's only because he's a good cook and a better handyman.
"Your place is sad," she says, fingering the spines of his poetry collection.
His seduction tactics are simple: Listen. Wait. Keep your mouth locked up tight.
When she's revealed a few socially acceptable yet endearing humiliations, she stands, gin in hand (her third), to consult his key collection. Thousands of antique keys hang from hooks he's screwed into the living room walls.
"Take one," he says. She holds up the heart-shaped key he's already given her. "Have another." She hangs the key on an empty hook and pours herself a fourth gin.
Later, she'll end up in his bed, where he'll spoon around her⎯he keeps meaning to begin a spoon collection; spoons, like keys, tarnish without losing their utility. He only pretends to sleep, listening to her listen to his breath, which he deliberately slows and steadies. He waits for her to slip out of bed and into the silk robe he's left hanging on the doorknob.
She will take down the first key that calls to her. Sometimes it is heart-shaped; other times it resembles a knife or spoon. Examining his sleeping body, she'll find dozens, hundreds of locks. She tests the ones that most intrigue. First, she'll slot the key she's chosen into the hole above his heart (always they try the heart first), but when that fails to open, she'll move on, perhaps to his left shoulder blade, or the soft pad of flesh behind his right knee, or the knob of bone where spine meets neck. Her tentative explorations grow more insistent as her fingertips fumble for each new lock, as he fails to wake, as her key fails to open any part of him. Until she finds the bit she's meant to understand.
She unlocks his cheekbone and opens wide his face.
Inside, his body's made of tin; internally he's a suit of armor, hollowed out by all the times he's made himself a widower. Once she's gotten him open, she sticks her head into his and shouts wake up, but he pretends not to, despite how her voice echoes. His bright tin interior is cheerier than his skin's yellow pallor.
"What's your name again?" he asks the woman with her head halfway inside his. He knew it just a second ago. She recoils, slamming the door of his face.
"Were you awake the whole time?"
"Doesn't matter. You can be Pomegranate." He pinches the apples of her cheeks.
"Bambi," she says stiffly.
When he was younger he'd played the cello, that most human of instruments, cradling it between his knees like a woman he could never fully master. In another version of the story, his parents are an earl and a countess; in this one, they're real estate agents with multiple rental properties in several states. His mother put her heel through his cello once, complaining his sawing made too much noise. His father had a new instrument delivered within the hour. That was marriage: one part cruelty, one part neglect, two parts interchangeability. One wife as good as any other, swappable as batteries.
Now, he prefers the strong to the merciful, hence his long-cherished obsession with entrapment, cages, bonds. Pets in cardboard boxes, dolls on toy-store shelves, prisons, zoos, doorless towers, windowless schools, closed minds.
"I won't sleep with you," she says. Why won't she look at him? He could rend her limb from limb just to watch the splash of color, but he's long since dispensed with such formalities. No more ceremonies, dresses, rings, expense. No more vows. No more mess, no more cleanup. Deer, that plentiful, overpopulated species. Pomegranates with too many seeds; they stick in his teeth.
"Let me introduce you to your sisters."
He used to use a knife and fork, tuck a napkin into his shirt collar, but no more. He eats Pomegranate née Bambi in one tidy gulp. She sticks in his craw, but then the silk bathrobe works its magic and she slides comfortably inside.
Beneath his writhen heart he's built a cage within his ribs, behind the bars of which his wives clamor. He exhales their fear after he's consumed them. When he smokes, they cough. He sips gin and they get drunk in the rain. Symbiosis, like any good marriage.
The wives had names, but once they're in his belly, he calls them after food. Apple (his first wife, the boring one), Artichoke (pliant, retiring, too rich for his taste), Arugula (harsh with waiters and deliverymen), Apricot (older than his usual, with laugh lines at her lips), Avocado (a throw-away one night stand, as tonight's will likely prove to be). And that's not even half the A's he keeps inside, never mind the rest of the abecedarium. So terribly many wives. He imagines the other girls must be directing the new recruit to her rooms, showing her the ropes, offering condolences.
Or perhaps not. He begins to shudder violently. They do this sometimes, his wives. Line up to rattle the bars of his ribcage.
He's large enough to hold every wife in his belly; he only wishes he could hold every wife in his mind. Their names, scents, likes and dislikes. Monogamy would make it easier to remember, but then what would he eat? Women are a puzzle to him—no, puzzle pieces. The rose perfume of his fourteenth wife, the seal-bark of his fifth, the way the twenty-first pronounced "please" as "police." No matter how he fits them together, the pieces never cohere.
On nights when a new wife is settling in, he watches television, tonight's program an exposé of malfeasance in the contemporary art world. An artist sits with his back to the camera; the shadow he casts on the wall does the talking for him. "I made these silhouettes of women in cages, slowly starving." The artist breaks down, choking back sobs. "I didn't mean to hurt anyone. But it had to look authentic."
He imagines his wives gnawing their way out of him.
The television set at the end of the bed is attuned to his desires; it responds to his needs. Right now, he needs to drown in other people's romances while he chokes down his own. He watches the deadening screen with deliberate focus. Once his insides stop churning, he reinserts the small key into his cheekbone, checks to make sure he's locked up tight, then replaces the key on an empty hook. A thousand hooks just like it jut from the blank walls that enclose him.
2. Door that opens onto white space. A planchette. Scrabble tiles: O, O, M, D.
The haunted motel is by the shores of a large lake on which a tourist vessel once capsized. Everyone aboard drowned. The brochure claims that partially devoured corpses still wash ashore on a semi-regular basis.
We want to see a bloated corpse. We are not leaving until we see a bloated corpse. We are here to spice up our marriage, and a bloated corpse is just the ticket. Cheesy, perhaps, but fear is the necessary corollary to desire, and we want our spark back. Things have gone stale, cayenne-shoved-to-the-back-of-the-cupboard-and-forgotten stale. Neither of us finds anything particularly scary anymore, except the thought of losing the other. We have discussed imbalanced equations like: cancer is greater than not equal to monsters beneath the bed. Car accident beats serial killer. Suicide trumps zombie. We are realists.
The motel is a desolate place, unexpectedly so. It is high season. We were told to book rooms early. We were told to expect long lines. We were promised crowds, hundreds of people to get lost in, a collective good scare. Once we arrive, though, there are two other cars in the lot, one belonging to the front desk clerk, a pimply boy reading The Hollow Man issue #56 upside down. We are displeased. Being alone is actually frightening. Being alone is scariest of all.
We peruse the amenities. There is an animatronic alligator in the cow pond. You can see his mechanical interior every time his jaw opens and closes. This entertains us for thirty-seven seconds.
The beach contains not a single bloated corpse. We are disappointed; the search for corpses entertains us a scant twelve seconds.
We save the haunted corn maze for last. In the corn maze are statues, some of which are actual statues, others of which are actors waiting to scare us. We do not jump, even when someone whispers oogaboogabooga from deep in the corn. As we move farther afield, losing sight of the motel behind us, we see a door in the distance, set against the corn wall. The end, we assume. Except that every time we close in on it, it recedes.
"Do you see that door?"
"Why can't we reach it?"
We find ourselves in a dimly lit section of corn maze. At the center of a row stands a man.
"Hello, actor."
"It must be one of the props."
"No look, you can see skin between his glove and his sleeve."
We creep up on him like we're the ones planning a scare. He doesn't move. His face is made of tin (or is it face paint?) frozen as if mid-scream, but the skin at his wrist ripples with veins that pop and flatten, pop and flatten, like he's trying to communicate via blood pressure.
"So lifelike," we marvel.
Creepy, yes. Scary? Not so much. Still, we find we've been entertained an uncountable number of seconds, a very good sign for our futurity.
Underwhelmed, but up for more, we return to our room. The desk clerk has left our luggage by the door.
There's a mirror above the four-poster on which someone's painted in livid red, omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes. The coffee table is a lacquered Ouija board standing on severed mannequin legs. The coasters are planchettes. When we use one to read our fortune, it spells out D-O-O-M.
"Mood backwards," we note.
This entertains us for twenty-three seconds.
Then we see the shower. The curtain is a dead ringer for Psycho. Even the tile's the same. We marvel over the accuracy of detail. We've brought red wine to drink, but we are purists. There's no cover on the drain, just a hole like a lidless eye going straight down the pipes, a hole that we take turns pouring wine down, watching it swirl like red dye #4 plus corn syrup, just like in the movie. This amuses us for ninety-four seconds.
There is a television hanging on the wall, newer, but with kitschy wire rabbit ears pointing toward the ceiling. We notice a strange whirring sound, like a blade sharpener or the wings of a fat beetle.
Ooogaboogabooga say the floorboards and, with a pained winching sound, a raggedy scarecrow springs out of a trapdoor beside the bed. Its timing leaves much to be desired. We are entertained for less than four seconds, but inconvenienced for much longer, as the scarecrow does not wish to return to its hidey-hole.
The television is permanently muted, which is not unexpected given the price of the room. We're paying for cheap animatronics, for actors to freeze to death out in the corn, and for a raggedy man to pop out of the floor once an hour right on schedule. We are not paying to watch television. But we're used to falling asleep to its flickering light, so we leave it on.
There is only one channel and only one show. It's the one where an eligible gentleman chooses between thirty potential brides. All the contestants are ballerinas. An emblem at the corner of the screen shows a slender woman in a tutu, eyes averted. Behind her, the smiling face of the eligible gentleman hovers like a second head. The rich man goes on dates with attractive young women and systematically eliminates them.
"I'm getting sleepy," you say.
"But we're having so much fun!"
"Are we?" You put your head on the pillow and pass out and I'm bored even before your breathing's steadied. You're sound asleep when the eligible gentleman brandishes a chainsaw and eliminates the first girl.
"Wake up."
"What."
"You missed it. On the TV."
You don't even open your eyes. The eligible gentleman murders each girl at regular fifteen-minute intervals, promptly after the commercial break. Each ballerina goes on a fantasy date to a famous ballet, and afterward he gives each one a flower. To keep track of who's been disposed of, I note flower, ballet, and means of execution: Pansy, Giselle, chainsaw. Violet, Swan Lake, axe. Chrysanthemum, Nutcracker, rotating blades. I can't stop watching.
Ooogaboogabooga say the floorboards. I put my foot on the trap door until the scarecrow quiets.
Beside the television, a door appears, possibly the same one from the corn maze. Up close I can see in its lock is a heart-shaped key. Open me up, the door beckons. What's behind me? You want to know. Speculation entertains me for fifteen seconds.
"Wake up. That door from the cornfield? It's back."
"Don't open it. Don't go down there. You don't want to know," you mumble sleepily, your eyes shut.
The eligible gentleman takes no joy in what he's doing, dispatching girls with systematic precision. And then every flower has been given but two: a red rose and a white. Who will be next for elimination?
The runner-up is drowned after a viewing of Sleeping Beauty and a series of car ads. Her killer places a white rose between her teeth. The winner is allowed into a single, dimly lit room to survey her competitors' corpses. The final shot is of the eligible gentleman handing the winner a red rose. We can see that behind his back he holds a diamond ring. She's shaking and tears soak her shirt collar. Credits roll.
I find I have been entertained for as much as a solid hour. I shake my wife violently.
"There was a bloated corpse on the television, and you missed it. It was everything we've ever wanted."
She snores faintly, then mumbles, "You know, I've never really liked horror."
A marriage is the accrual of thousands of seconds. I open the door and step into the darkness. I let her sleep.
3. One-legged tin soldier. Heart-shaped lump of tin. A bit of tinsel. Matches.
The box artist lives in a series of interconnected boxes that from the outside look like nothing: a bricolage of corrugated cardboard, pallet wood, and particle board. His boxes appear to have spontaneously generated from between the cracks of a random stretch of sidewalk in Queens. They push out onto the street where cars swerve improbably to avoid them; they stack upward one atop the next.
Inside, the artist's boxes are lush and lovely, full of a magpie's collection of treasures. They (the boxes, the treasures, the artist himself) are by turns beautiful, capricious, and naïve. At some point a car will fail to swerve. A truck will slam on its brakes. And that will be the end of things. There will be a flattening.
The box artist is not an artist so much as a curator, and you have joined this particular tour so as to witness the minutiae of curation. The tour is small, only three other people standing beside you on the sidewalk, tickets in hand: a bored couple and their young son. You try to guess his age.
"Welcome!" says the box artist. He is lean, thin-lipped, balding, eccentric with enthusiasm. He has no eyebrows. Up close, it's possible to see wisps of white where his eyebrows ought to be, faint marks like chalk smudged above his lids. "I'm so happy to have chosen each of you." Wondering what he means by such a Wonka-esque statement (you found out about this tour from the guidebook), you step into the first box, leaving sunlight behind.
Inside, the box is hung in sheets of opaque plastic. Behind them, obscured figures claw through, shadow-people trying to escape suffocation. You hope they are mannequins, not actors.
He does not use fabric in any of his boxes, the artist explains. He once worked at a fabric store where he swathed himself in unmade garments, imagining what this silk, that paisley might grow up to be. Now, fabric reminds him of lost possibility.
You move on to the next room, where pelts of dead animals insulate the walls. In the center, a plinth, on which sits a box of ivory.
"This box is full of dead skin," the box artist explains. "Fingers and toes were easiest, but when the humidity was low I could peel my elbows and underarms too. Long strips like sticky silk. I put clipped nails in there, curling waning moons. Every box is self-display, but this one is perhaps the most literal."
You move on to the next room, which is red veined in blue, like the interior of a heart.
"I fell in love with a ballerina. I've loved many ballerinas, but she was my favorite, because she was more beautiful than Lauren Bacall. I finally won her love, but she turned to paper in my arms. So I had my heart melted down. I keep it right here." A sculpture takes up most of the floor space. It doesn't look like a heart. It looks like car accident detritus fused by lightning. You try to make out shapes within its mass (this is an art tour, after all).
The tour pauses so everyone can examine the heart, as good a moment as any for a smoke break. Put a cigarette in your mouth. Take a matchbox out of your pocket.
He notices the cigarette between your lips. "My ballerina smoked. I disapprove of smoking. Conditions are highly flammable."
You light up anyway, gray tendrils spilling ostentatiously from your nostrils.
"If you weren't such a lovely young thing I'd request you put that out. Do you dance? Have you ever? You could dance here, if you like."
You feel uncomfortably curated. When you shake your head, the politest no you can manage, he shrugs and leads the tour on to the next room. Here the walls are painted white. A black box with gold clasps sits on a dais. It looks like a massive old-fashioned jewelry box or a Goldin box meant for sawing a woman in half.
"And now may I present: my favorite ballerina."
The box artist unclasps the gold latches, opens the lid, and a life-size cardboard cutout of a ballerina pops up. She's thin as a thaumatrope. When you look at her straight on, she appears three-dimensional, but then she pirouettes and flattens, her substance flickering, there and gone. She is not so beautiful as you'd expected from the artist's description (artists always exaggerate. They always lie). She doesn't look a thing like Bacall. She begins twirling to the theme of Sleeping Beauty. Wrapped around the ballerina's thigh is a shining silver garter.
"Her spangle. She wore it every time she danced." He strokes the tinsel encircling her leg and invites each of you forward to touch it. The little boy, when it's his turn, pulls hard on the garter, then lets go, snapping it against the cardboard.
The box artist does not stop the boy. Instead, he knocks over the ballerina and holds her down so he can stroke her face oh so sweetly. The music pauses via some internal mechanism triggered by her collapse. When he releases her, she springs back into pirouette and the music starts up again. Over and over he does this, lets the box play a passage, then knocks the dancer down, her legs folding beneath her like ungainly birds. You feel she would like to keep dancing, if only the artist would let her.
"This box I made for my ballerina after she bound my feet and hands and stuffed my mouth with bloody ribbons," the artist explains. "Then she danced on me en pointe. She broke two ribs and shattered my pelvis. The power in those legs could crush a man. I had multiple rib fractures. It was like my insides had turned to knives; I couldn't help but stab myself internally."
Your matches have gone missing. Check your coat pockets, skirt pockets, purse. Check the floor around the ballerina. As you stand up, her spangle sparkles. The bored little boy who snapped her spangle stands near her feet, watching as she spins. Her spangle is the wrong color, not the reflected daylight that filters between the boxes in yellow streaks, but the orangey-red of flame.
That boy has your matchbox and the ballerina is on fire. The box artist stiffens—you watch his face as his paper love crumples—and you think you might be strong enough to lift him, fireman carry him to safety even if he won't save himself. But when you reach him, he's flat as a page. When you try to lift him, he's heavy as a misshapen lump of metal. You abandon them both and follow the boy and his parents as they slip between the boxes to safety.
You grab the kid's elbow, the little pyro, and he tosses you your matches like he doesn't give two shits what you think. He's drawn something on the outside of the box: the faint outline of a heart-shaped key, sketched in ballpoint.
"We're going to see the Unlocked Man," he says. "He opens tonight."
On the matchbox cover he's scribbled the name of a gallery, one you've passed before. He and his parents head uptown.
You open the matchbox, fumbling for a light. You need a cigarette. Inside the box, another story is taking place.
4. One box, tall as a man. Map on which a small section is blank. Small pile of bones.
Bluebeard's wives plan to break out of his digestive-system Alcatraz. They've made a map of their collective knowledge. Artichoke unlocked his left shoulder; she knows the contours of his humerus where it attaches to his scapula and can get them past the deltoids and pectorals that surround it. Arugula unlocked his upper left thigh; she knows the secrets of his femur, hamstring and quadriceps. Avocado unlocked the soft nub of flesh behind his elbow; she sketches in the passageway from radius and ulna up into the humerus. Bone by unlocked bone the wives piece together the labyrinth of his interior.
They pack up their belongings, intending to travel light, and set out into pulsing red darkness. The map guides them, their path circuitous as they follow veins from limb to limb, an alphabet's worth of wives shuffling along like blood cells.
At last they reach his heart, which is ugly and small and made of a substance they don't recognize, something hard and gunmetal gray. None of them are sure how it continues to beat. There's a door inset in its dull surface.
Not one of them had been able to unlock his heart, though for each of them it'd been the first place they'd tried. The map they've made is complete but for that one blank, terra incognita, dragons here reside.
"Fold up the map and shove it in the lock," says Pomegranate, and they do.
The map-key slides into its lock with the rustle-click of a camera shutter. One by one they file through the door.
The wives emerge into an empty hotel room. An old woman lies on the bed staring up at the mirror above her, on which the wives can read the words omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrantes.
Excuse us, they say. We're sorry to bother you but.
The old woman sits up. "You're not who I was expecting."
The wives aren't sure how to respond to this.
The old woman slides her legs over the edge of the bed, stands, then totters to the open door.
Don't open it. Don't go in there. You don't want to know, say the wives, but it's too late.
The old woman steps into a gallery where an art show is in full swing. Papier-mâché fruit and silk flowers bloom from the walls. Hors d'oeuvres float above her head, carried on silver trays borne by young women dressed like ballerinas. The old woman feels awkwardly underdressed in her silk bathrobe.
She recognizes the box artist from his picture in the papers. Beside him stands the main exhibit. She steps up to the glass case for a closer examination. Her breath skips—and here she'd thought nothing could scare her.
Inside the exhibit is her husband, she's sure of it. She'd recognize that bald spot, those narrow shoulders and broad hands, anywhere. He's let the artist frame him, enclosing him in a box of wood with a thick glass door. But something's wrong with his skin. It's been segmented, and small squares of flesh jut out of him at regular intervals. He's been compartmentalized, his body a living, breathing card catalog.
Every box has been slid open so gallery patrons can peer inside. She stands on her tiptoes, the better to see. A few of the boxes contain objects she recognizes. A cork. A heart-shaped key. Other objects elude her. A hunk of metal. A matchbox. In a few, bloody organs glisten. An artery. A lung. She finds her husband terribly beautiful, now that he's been exposed.
She wonders what he thinks, her husband. What does the picture dream in his frame?
He dreams every fear he keeps stored inside. Fear of strangers, fear of commitment, fear of horror movies. Fear of fire. Fear no one will ever love him. The smallest boxes he stores in his head, and in these he puts his worst fears: fear he'll be misunderstood. Fear he'll always disappoint. Fear of enclosed spaces. Fear of being alone.
An old woman taps on the glass. She's trying to get his attention. She seems familiar, and he wants her to look at him. No one else. Just her.
He loves her for examining him with such focus. He wants her to look forever, until she's seen the interior of every compartment. He would never leave the confines of this box his frame, even if it meant starving to death, so long as he knew she'd be there, watching. He wants her to count every bone beneath his skin. If she'd only join him, he'd beg her to paw through these boxes filled with everything in him and of him. She could take whatever she wanted.
Unlock the door, he mouths to her. Please. I want you to come in.