Riddance. Shelley Jackson
I should explain why I chose to make this dress out of paper and not a stouter substance. For while a fiery demise could not reasonably have been foreseen, a watery one would seem eminently likely, the mouth being a soggy sort of cotillion. But I will always choose paper when I can: it is an ideal conductive medium for spirits. I must have sensed this when, as a child, I had the habit of chewing into a cud corners torn from the pages of books.
Only yesterday, on one of my rare visits to town, the Cheesehill librarian splattered me with dung as she drove by in her motorcar, for she is grown very grand now that she is married and her husband a wealthy man.
On the whole, I am glad you are dead; every author should be dead. When I first understood that most of them are, I was a little relieved, for the idea that they might be paring their corns or nibbling almonds while their ghosts murmured prematurely in my ear seemed not only disorienting but a little unseemly. It is hard to yield oneself fully to communion with a person who somewhere may be singing in a saloon,
There was a fiddler and he wore a wig,
Wiggy wiggy wiggy wiggy, weedle, weedle, weedle,
He saved up his money and he bought a pig,
Piggy piggy piggy piggy, tweedle, tweedle, tweedle.
I see, sir, from the jut of your beard (I have your book propped open to your portrait), that you would not have sung such a song even when in the indiscreet condition that is life, but there is no telling what a man may do in the fullness of time and under the influence of spirits—alcoholic spirits, I mean—so it is very good that you are out of the way of temptation; I have seldom known the dead to sing. (That gives me quite a good idea, however—I must speak to our Mr. Lenore.)
But my little dress is becoming sodden and no spirits come. Do not be angry, Mr. Melville, but I wonder why you do not come? One of the ladies of the Harmonial Sisterhood chats regularly with Genghis Khan, and marvels that he speaks such good English, but I would much rather speak to you.
Sorrowfully,
Miss Sybil Joines
3. The Final Dispatch, contd.
[Extended static, several words indistinct] . . . someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity, havoc, ruin! Make things right, set things straight, mend, amend, avert . . .
No, no, no, I must not allow myself to get so excited. Now I shall have to start all over again, trumping up a world to catch her in! Only a moment ago, as it seems, I was hurrying down a familiar road. For all its spectral dogs and rabbits, it was, as near as I could make it, the way home. The girl was in my sights! And then my heart flared up white inside me, and road and ravine and crowding hills all blanched and raveled into filaments like the thread-thin hyphae of a fungus. The girl is gone. I am alone on a blank page.
This is not a metaphor. The white is not sand, scorching the feet of the solitary figure trudging from left to right across the otherwise unblemished dune. The white is not snow, blanketing a battlefield in soft heaps, through which the occasional bayonet protrudes like the ascender of a buried d. The white is not ash—[static, several words indistinct]. The page is the one on which you are transcribing these words. It is white because the cellulose fibers of which it is made—in Fitchburg, Massachusetts, as I happen to know—are bleached during manufacture, in a process called brightening. Nothing supernatural about that. And yet its brightness and the brightness around me are the same brightness.
What? Yes. I exist, at present, only on this page, since I exist, at present, only in these words. What? Yes. I say I, your right middle finger strikes a key, an inked hammer impresses a letter on the void, and—mirabile dictu—I am. [Extended pause, bad static, distant howling.]
[Word or words indistinct: possibly “Am I?”]
Are you receiving?
“Are you receiving?” you type, because you are. (Surely you are!) Your starched collar saws delicately at your already sore chin as your body moves with your hands. Your hair whispers against the rim of the brass trumpet to which your ear is pressed, straining to hear the faint, crackly voice rising and falling in the bell. My voice, speaking from the land of the dead, though I am not dead, as I believe, as I have reason to believe. Perhaps not reason enough. Nonetheless, it is my working theory that I am not dead.
“Not dead,” you agree. And I remember how it’s done.
I say the words: “dirt road,” “ravine,” “small wooden bridge.” You take them down. On the page, a world springs up. It is this world. It is as real as I can make it. Real enough to bear my weight, or how could I cross its quags and torrents to the girl? I don’t look down at the planks, the cracks between the planks, the white streaming below. This is where experience tells. Describe the white and I will fall in. Describe the planks and I will be naming nails for all eternity. Itemizing splinters. No, it is enough to say “bridge” to cross it. Say “steep and winding road” to make my way.
[Rustling.]
If only I were sure that I am not making you, dear listener, as well!—and all your accoutrements: your stockings, for example, black, pilling at the knee, bunching at the ankle, sagging into the heels of the regulation shoes that are always a little too big, when they are not too small. If only I were sure that I did not imagine your ears, upon which so much depends, standing out a little from your skull, but delicate, the satin skin stretched over the cartilegi cartilaginous form, two coracles, one a redder brown than the other, hot from the trumpet against which it is pressed. Your hair, ultra-fine, black, kinky, scraped into braids, exposing the elegant shape of the skull and the thin neck, the part a line like a scar, as if someone had once tried to cut you in half. Your nose a little pinched with concentration and perhaps annoyance, for I am talking about you instead of about the land of the dead, or even the girl Finster, and you do not approve. You are all business. It is what I like about you. Little dents form on either side of your nose. Small nose. Small nostrils officiously flared.
Are you receiving?
Through the trees the blank page shines at the head of the rise. The gradient is steep, but the footing is good, and I need only hitch up my skirts to step over the rivulets of white that cut through the road on occasion, as if to remind me to keep my mind on the—
Officiously flared, did you get that down? I shall keep talking about you until you remember your duty, which is, one—to take dictation; and, pursuant to that end, two—to exist. Because if you don’t— Your neck: Is there a scarf around it? No. A crucifix? A locket would be better, on a thin gold chain, not real gold, gold-plated, the gold worn to gray. And in the locket? Let’s say a tuft of fine brown hair, straighter than your own, and possibly not even human, the hair of a dog, perhaps, or a donkey, or a goat, or a [word indistinct]—
A child is missing, a child is lost—
But there is nothing to be gained by panic. We are making what haste we can. Already I have put the ravine behind me. In front of me I have put the road, of course, and a muddy field where thistles mutter and twitch. Meanwhile it steadies my mind to think about you, phlegmatically typing “phlegmatically,” and without even needing to check the spelling. You wear a ring on the thumb of one small but wide, rather rough, dry hand, and it sometimes rings like a bell against the frame of the typewriter, as now—ding! Your ring, unlike your locket, is true gold, though worn thin in some spots. It was probably your dead mother’s ring, unless your mother still lives, let her live, why not, though much altered, for the worse, by the syphilis.
You half rise. Then you regulate yourself and sit back down. I suppose you think I am wasting my time baiting you when I could be describing wonders heretofore unknown to science. The silhouettes wheeling high above me now, for instance, of the greatest of the many birds seen here, if they are birds, which they are not, and yet they are not anything else either. They gyre around a single point. Naturally it is myself, or rather a point directly above me. They are almost stationary in flight, despite their huge, ungainly