the rise and fall.

part one.
A taxidermied zebra was the first thing you saw upon entering the Bellflower’s mansion. It was situated in a corner of the always dim, cold foyer between a potted palm and a portrait of the family. Before he died, Father Bellflower wouldn’t let anyone walk past the thing without relaying the tale of it’s capture and kill,
“Africa,”
He would stammer, his voice rattling with age
“Damn hot place. Went there on safari, nearly died of heat exhaustion. Shot the bastard from my jeep, in those days no one at the airport gave you shit for having a dead animal.”
The zebra was not the most unusual thing about 77 Gregory Avenue, nor was the ancient swimming pool caked with green sludge being used as a pet cemetery, or the bedroom on the third floor which contained thousands of toothbrushes, so a new one could be used every time. The residents of the house were what made you look twice. The Bellflower family. They weren’t always this way, their toenails weren’t always curling over the lips of their sandals, their eyes weren’t always glazed over and blood shot. It’s hard to say when they all went over the cliff, these things usually happen when we aren’t paying attention. They bred dogs, Greyhounds specifically, and this is how I came to know them. When you buy an animal from a good breeder, they usually want to keep in touch. When you buy one from the Bellflower’s, they want you to move in. They insist upon it. I was thirteen and there was nobody to tell me not to.

I consider this as I pretend to examine a stack of filmy x-rays Susan Bellflower, the middle daughter, has dropped into my lap. At just forty years old she has accumulated a mysterious assortment of ailments, including selective sight and hearing, debilitating joint pain and multiple personalities.
“This is where the growths are,” Susan nods slowly, with a sage wisdom that I almost believe.
“They aren’t showing up in the x-ray, but their right here.”
She jabs her bony index finger into the pale flesh of her neck.
“What growths, like a tumor?” I ask, distracted by her eye twitching.
“No, like a twin.”
“You don’t have a twin.”
“Exactly. But I was meant to, she just didn’t get to finish growing. But I can feel her hands under my skin, you know? I keep telling the white coats.”
I look back at the x-rays, Susan’s bones are ghostly and brittle looking, but there are no extra limbs or rogue fetuses. I could never tell her this.
“Well, sometimes it takes a while to find the right doctor.”
She wrings her hands together, each finger is covered in rings. Some wildly expensive pieces with diamonds like ice cubes and strawberry rubies are mixed with a couple of gaudy plastic things and the occasional rubber band wrapped around twice. Gold bangles encase her scrawny, freckled arms up to the elbow. She wears no shoes, but has a band-aid stuck on each toe. Her dress is white, I thought the hem was lace from far away, but can now see it is just moth-eaten. She has her nicotine yellow hair wrapped in a turban, the teal fabric is worn and has a wilting sunflower stuck in the center. Susan’s false eyelashes are slightly crooked and give the appearance of being either half-asleep or drunk. She has, as usual, given herself a beauty mark with eyeliner and painted her lips with concealer so they blend into the rest of her gaunt face. Her mouth spreads into a slow, medicine-sweet smile,
“You know, when I was young I looked a lot like you.”
“Really?”
I wonder to myself if that means I will look like her in thirty years.
“Jesus lord, my neck hurts…so about my twin, I haven’t told the family about it..”
At that moment a blood rattling screech erupts from the kitchen, which is adjacent to the dining room we are sitting in.
“FOURTH OF JOO-LIE, EVERYBODY!!!”
Susan’s face hardens, her knuckles tighten.
“That’s mother.”
“GET YOUR FIRE CRACKERS OUT OF THE ATTIC!!!”
A small, round woman tumbles in through the swinging door. She wears a white hospital gown festooned with red, white and blue ribbons and blinking American flag pins. She wears a red and white striped party hat, and waves a paper Israeli flag on a wooden stick.
“Mother, I’ve told you to stay in your chair.”
Mother Bellflower stares directly at me,
“Susan doesn’t believe in the fourth of July.”
“Mother, get back into your chair.”
I study the old woman, her bare feet are bulging with purple veins and her yellow toenails are thick, wavy and dangerously jagged. Her face is mottled with sun spots and metallic star stickers. She turns slowly and hobbles into the kitchen, muttering. Susan turns to me,
“Let me show you something.”
I follow her past the zebra, then through a narrow corridor cluttered with hospital supplies. She touches the walls as she walks, as if feeling for a pulse, then stops at a crudely painted green door.
“This is where I keep them.” She swings it open casually, we are flooded with a cacophony of hysterical barks and howls. She switches on a light, at least fifty grey hounds are clustered at the bottom of the basement steps. Susan shouts over the din,
“I told my sister, if she ever comes back here to take anything from me, I’ll shoot each of these dogs and THEN myself!”
She slams the door shut, I say
“What’s wrong with your sister?” Which really means, what’s wrong with you?
“Oh…Vivica…”
“That’s her name?”
Susan sighs and stops in front of a mirror propped up against the wall in the corridor, she adjusts her eyelashes,
“She was always sour, I hated her even when we were little girls. Mother told me she was sick with jealously over me when I was born so she tried to smother me in my crib one night! Can you imagine! Then when I was just a toddler she left me outside in a snow drift, then went off to school. I think there must be lemon seeds in her heart, that’s how sour she is. I’ve warned her, if she comes back here I’ll shoot myself. She always comes at night, looking for things to take, trying to smother me in my sleep.”
She smoothes the front of her dress and looks at me for a long time,
“Excuse me. I need some air.”
She disappears into the gut of the house and I know she won’t be coming back. When I wake up in the morning there is a gaunt, sallow-skinned man sitting on the edge of my bed. I am more disturbed by the fact that I am not even surprised by his presence than the idea that he has probably been watching me sleep.
“Hi.” He says flatly
“Who the fuck are you?” I say, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes and pulling the quilt around my shoulders. His eyes, spinning and dark like uncontrollable saucers, widen.
“Raphael.”
“Do you live here.”
“I’m Susan’s brother.”
“I thought you never leave your room.”
“Did Susan tell you that?” I nod and pull on a pair of shorts under the sheets.
“Well, I am writing a book. It consumes a lot of my time.”
“What’s it about?”
I pull my hair up into a bun and reach into the drawer for my toothbrush, Raphael smiles slightly,
“I disposed of your toothbrush for you.”
“Why would you do that?" He appears alarmed, even slightly offended.
“We adhere strictly to a one use policy concerning oral hygiene.”
He produces a new toothbrush from his pocket and hands it to me, “Use this one. I have hundreds.” He sits cross-legged on the foot of the bed while I get ready.
“It’s a memoir. My book.”
“Really?”
“It can only be published after I die, or after they die. Suppose Vivica read it. Do you know about Vivica? She’s our sister, she’s mad. She would slaughter me if she read it. I write my transcripts in invisible ink.”
“Bullshit.”
“I must take every precaution.”
“Susan said Vivica tried to kill her.”
Raphael nods, “Several times.” He squints his eyes and really looks at me, “Are you Yvonne’s daughter?” I nod “You look just like she used to.”
“You know my mother?”
“Oh, she bought dogs from us before you were born. How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.”
“How did you end up here?”
“I didn’t really feel like being home.”
“You can stay until you feel like leaving. You can read my transcripts.”
“I thought they were written in invisible ink.”
Raphael stares at the wall behind my head for what seems like hours, there is an ambulance siren in the distance, there is a fly crawling on his hand and he doesn’t notice.

“We lost one.”
Out by the pool Susan is lying on a rusty deck chair in a zebra striped bikini, even though it is overcast and the clouds are pregnant with rain. A small white box rests at her feet,
“Will you help us with the burial?”
“Is that a dog in there?”
She nods, flipping up the brim of her white sunhat and staring at me through smudged Jackie O glasses, “That was Uncle Houlihan, right there. We found him this morning. He was old.”
Raphael and Mother Bellflower appear at my side holding a leather bound book and a bundle of red poppies.
“Let’s get started.”
Raphael and Susan lift a green tarp off of the pool, Mother Bellflower grips my hand and we walk to the edge. It has been drained of water but there is a thick layer of green sludge caked to the sides, nine white boxes identical to the one I just saw are arranged in rows at the bottom.
“Justine, would you like to read from our book of blessings.”
“Sure.”
Raphael hands me the journal and I open to the first page,
“Just say Uncle Houlihan’s name where it says ‘the deceased’”
I clear my throat and squint to read the sloppy letters scrawled across the tattered page,
“Uncle Houlihan left us today. Even though his earthly body is gone, his spirit will never leave the walls of this home. Today, he will begin his next journey through heaven’s poppy fields and we must rejoice in knowing that Uncle Houlihan will return to us one day, in another lifetime.”

Susan, Raphael and Mother Bellflower nod solemnly. Without speaking we each take a corner of the box and lower it into the pool, I throw the poppies into the pit and it occurs to me that all of the other thirteen year old girls are at camp, and ballet and the mall. They do not wake up with strange men in their rooms, they do not bury dead animals or deal with the mentally ill. The thought blows through me like a torpedo, the sky splits open and the rain pours down.

Decatur.

3AM i dreamt about explosions, plumes of dust and gravel and the odd limb careening out of the debris and landing next to me, I was sitting with my cassette player listening to what to do during such an explosion, but it was so loud I couldn’t hear the instructions. 7AM it occurs to me, I need to see something blow up. I brush my teeth and think of sound and how heavy it is, and how heavy the sound of an office building roaring into oblivion would be, as opposed to a copper beech tree or an aluminum trailer. then there is a mushroom cloud in my coffee mug, my frozen sausage links are really sticks of dynamite. 10AM I decide limestone would have a delicious weight to it, but I will settle for marble or even gypsum. in the car I understand it must be fate, rock quarries exist for this very reason. i bring a bag, a zip-loc bag, for the errant chunks of limestone that will inevitably gravitate towards me, I will save them in the bag and bring them to thanksgiving and tell everyone I did it with telekinesis. I sit on the ledge with my bag open for several hours, and for several hours nothing moves. the sun goes away and now it is too dark to see the explosion coming, anyway. 7PM I accuse myself of purposefully locking the keys in the car. that, I hiss, is something you WOULD do out of desperation. I say the word ‘sabotage’ aloud, and since no one is here I yell it I walk to the edge and scream SABOTAGE, it echoes off the rocks and comes back to me and I chuckle, I have sabotaged myself, I am getting dehydrated and my zip-loc bag is still empty so I toss it down into the quarry then think that now there will never be an explosion of any kind, because I have littered. 7:30PM is this a spiritual experience? I tell myself I am having a spiritual experience while I am walking down the road which is narrow and dusty and looks the same at the beginning and the end. five miles there is a farm house, pick up trucks collecting water a confederate flag three furious dogs a mailbox, a fish mailbox I do a practice knock on the aluminum door, ready for the owner of the gape jawed fish mailbox to open up. I imagine him to be Ed Gein, he will open the door and pull me in he will make soup stock from my femur, I will probably be made into a lampshade. 8PM inside the house I am looking at photo albums of cy and alma’s Canada vacation they have three children they moved from Nebraska they remember the prohibition have a sodium free diet and lost fifteen pounds with weight watchers no I am not lost, I lie, I am becoming a minimalist so I left my car with all my things in it. I want to fall into sleep and wake up one thousand years ago I want to see people gathering berries I want to see an antelope shot with an arrow i want to see cy and alma in loin cloths, emerging from the quarry explosion. 6AM instead of mushroom clouds, I see the fish mailbox in my coffee.

Deadhorse.

Deadhorse, Alaska is the furthest North anybody can go to live without dying, but it isn’t guaranteed you’ll survive. You could freeze, of course, and there are bears, but due to the isolation it is also possible to go for several months without speaking to another person. And this is sometimes enough to push you over the edge. It is populated almost entirely by oil workers and hookers, there are some registered sex offenders on the outskirts and possibly some good, solid people who just appreciate nature. There is a motel called, “The Almost There Motel” which can be funny if you are in the right mood because Deadhorse is the last stop. But this could also be what kills you, because it will remind you that you are living in a perpetually grey area. It will remind you that since you were born you have been almost there, and why not just jump already? I work at this particular motel, I also live in it because we are never at capacity. I guess I came here originally to write, I was certain there would be something really heart-breaking to tell everyone about, and I was right, the whole place is your worst nightmare. But I haven’t been able to leave yet, so no one knows about it but the oil men, hookers, sex offenders, and possibly the good nature folk. To actually get here I had to take a special bus that could go over the ice, it was painted bright orange and I assumed this was for optimal visibility should we plummet into the water at any point. We stopped overnight in a place called Cold Foot and I didn’t sleep at all. This is because I am not accustomed to the phenomenon called ‘Midnight Sun’ which, as you could probably guess, involved long periods of daylight, sometimes as long as several months. There is also something called ‘Polar Night’ which is the opposite, and involves going around in total darkness for days at a time. The motel in Cold Foot had no curtains and I imagined this to be a test of our resolve, to weed out the pushovers from warm cities like Dallas where the sun and moon are reliable things. This is the only place in the world where you cannot even trust the pull of the universe, the only thing you can be sure of is the fact that every day you are getting closer and closer to THERE. I brought this up with a very nice stripper named Goldaline who lives in the motel, and she told me her THERE is the cockpit of a commercial plane,
“I am the pilot” she told me,
and I said
“Maybe you could go to flight school.”
And she just smashed out her cigarette and looked at me like are you fucking crazy. And that is where the conversation ended, as you probably guessed. I am one of three people employed at the Almost There. There is the guy who owns it, his name is Ishmael and because of this I think of whale harpoons and biblical looking men when I see him. Then there is his wife, who’s name may or may not be Aggie, this is what I heard when she introduced herself at my interview which went basically like this
“We don’t usually take outsiders.”
“I wouldn’t either.”
“Are you an upstanding person?”
“I like to think so.”
“Can you use a vacuum.”
They gave me a key to room number seven, and told me I could live in there if no one else needed it, the carpet smelled of menthol and there were curtains because I had proven I was rugged enough for the routine of gravity to be pulled out from under me. I sat on the starchy floral bedspread and thought about the worst things I had ever done and how they would never come back to me because somehow, I knew I would probably never leave this place.

1.I was crossing the street in Philadelphia and saw a man get hit by a car, he was shot up into the air like a champagne cork and the awful cracking sound that happened when he came back down made me throw up on the sidewalk, so instead of calling 911, I went home and laid down.

2.I compulsively stole toothbrushes from people’s homes as a teenager and feigned confusion when they stood at the sink, baffled. I hoarded them in the back of my closet.

3.I poured a box of sugar into my male super’s gas tank when I was nineteen as initiation into a radical lesbian separatist group. I am not really radical and probably not a lesbian, but I liked the idea of forging into oblivion with a group of women who were really sure of something.

Aggie knocked on my door and said
“Folks aren’t gonna check 'emselves in!”
So instead of the bedspread I sat behind the counter and measured my distance from these things.


The second day we entered a period of Polar Night, Ishmael came to my desk post with an orange bottle,
“When night starts up for more than a day, we take a couple of these. Makes time pass easier.”
My level of gratitude for the pills was disproportionate to the act of his giving them to me, I felt like a daughter I felt like a cancer kid or someone who works very hard at their mediocre job. He gave some to Goldaline also, and I felt betrayed. At some point a man and a woman walked into the lobby. I was completely unprepared to accommodate them in any way because they were the first people to patronize the motel since I began working, and I had spent the past week proving my adept vacuuming abilities and taking baths in the dark.
I said “Welcome!” a little too loudly.
They were both dressed in a way that suggested wealth but also an awareness for things like the environment and worker’s rights. Sleek down coats with real shearling trimmed hoods and durable boots. The man wore round tortoise shell glasses and I could see a turtleneck peeking out from under his socially responsible jacket. Cashmere, probably. He smiled like a professor and said,
“We’d like to check in, not sure how long we’ll be staying.”
I nodded, again, too fast, too eagerly. His wife was beautiful in such a way that required no assistance or upkeep, you found yourself thinking that you too could be beautiful in that way if you left everyone’s toothbrushes where they belonged. You look at her eyes, which are light grey and enormous, and think of hand knit sweaters and places like Nantucket or the less commercial Cape Cod. You think of her and Turtleneck cooking things like couscous and quail eggs in their tastefully rustic kitchen. Her hair is the same color everywhere and is graciously, bashfully wound into a loose knot at the base of her genuinely modest neck.
I say,“What brings you folks to Deadhorse?” and immediately feel like an imposter, a professional cordial hostess impersonater, someone’s sexually repressed mother, Paula Deen in bizarro world.
“Just passing through.” they say and
Grey Eyes smiles serenely, like she is perpetually slipping into a warm bath. She probably came out of her mother with this smile on her apple-white face. I want to choke her with an umbilical cord and wash her hair patiently, like a withered Irish nanny, at the same time. Turtleneck speaks,
“I see your having a Polar Night.”
“Seven days now.”


They left early the next morning with their cameras hung around their necks, they carried a map and asked me where was a good spot to see the aurora borealis, I didn’t know because frankly the whole phenomenon terrifies me, so they asked Ishmael and I was at least able to suggest a scenic foot trail, but then remembered it was too dark out to go on a hike.
“Nice couple.”
Aggie croaked from her stool by the window.
“Wonder what theyre doing all the way up in Deadhorse.”
Adopting an Inuit baby saving seal cubs making a religious pilgrimage finding his biological mother seeing the finback whales before they all go extinct probably becoming enlightened like people with effortless beauty do, sometimes.
“Just passing through.” I say
Aggie takes a slug of coffee from her mug which has OVER THE HILL printed on the side in big pink letters.
“Why don’t you go clean up their room.”

I vacuum Turtleneck and Grey Eye’s carpet even though it doesn’t need it, I wipe off the sink with Lysol and fold the end piece of toilet paper into a perfect triangle and wonder how much further I can possibly go. I start to change their sheets but find myself cocooned in them on the floor with the duvet over my head their pillows clutched in my hands like they were the last things I would ever hold, like they were my hands, my hands as a child, my five year old self holding on over the edge of a cliff and all of the sudden I am speaking out loud
DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO DON’T LET GO,
and the curtains are saying YOU ARE ALMOST THERE
YOU ARE ALMOST THERE

Everyone I have ever known is under this duvet cover on the floor and they are all clapping and saying this has been a test you have passed the test. The couple is there and they have their Inuit baby in their slender, long arms they have a photo album of the finback whales and pictures of the aurora borealis, and I am not terrified of it anymore. My old super is there and he says, The car was a prop! Don’t worry!, The radical separatist lesbians are there and they say This guy is our best friend! The man who got hit by the car is there, It didn’t hurt at all! I have Dysautonomia, I feel no pain! Ishmael and Aggie are huddled together with a candle between them and they say this is our light, this is daylight, we have a sun we have a son he is giving us light. Everyone has their toothbrushes back, they had extras anyway, Goldaline is wearing a pilot’s hat and command bars on her shoulders she says I am 30,000 feet away we are somewhere over the Atlantic and we will be THERE shortly.