Sleep On

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Fiction by Caroline Szpak

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Two weeks later, Bridget still sleeps on a tattered line of blood. The brown scarps of it spattered on the bedsheets in the shape of a steep hill, sloping towards the wall. Blunt glass had damaged a nerve in her middle finger—she can’t feel anything there at all, except when she reaches for something, hand flexing, and the wound on the joint snaps open like the jaw of some scabby dog about to bite down. Then the pain shoots through everything at once, and she can do nothing but bend in half and clench to become numb again, the bandage fraying like an old pulse from the curve of her hand.

Hours ago, the heat creaked back in through the pipes after weeks of broken chill. Things have started to slip from her grip because of the sweat. Kitchen utensils thud against the carpet, a few soft bumps at her bare feet until the motion stops under her gaze.

She draws an angular face on the steam clinging to the bathroom mirror. It remains nameless—pain jolts through her hand before she’s able to recognize its features. Bridget decides to leave her bathrobe on for the evening.

The bottom lids of her eyes are lifting, thinning the room as the freckled girl next door lets out the final squeaks of an hour-long cry. The yelps are muffled but amplified, as if her mouth was flattened right up against the other side of the wall. She can chew her way through.

The only time she and Bridget spoke was in the laundry room. The girl flipped through her wallet as she waited for her cycle to end. Before she said anything, she pulled all her bills out—fanning them at her chest as if synchronizing a fleet of swimmers in her hands, and started going on about paper money being all different colours, how she recognized a bill by its colour alone and never by the face printed on it.

Bridget asked if she was from here, and the girl said, “No. I came on an overnight bus. I’ve been following the new math.” Bridget didn’t know what that meant but started to think of equations and limbs poking out from water at right angles—let cause equal x.

The timer blasted like a foghorn and the girl bent at the waist to yank out her soggy load, the bundle dripping against her stomach. Her clothes were the colour of wet sand, thick sodden materials like waterlogged bodies washed up on a beach—she could have been cradling a soldier, facedown in Normandy, Operation Overload. After this run-in, Bridget heard her singing about chain gangs through the wall. She was sure the girl made the words up as she went along. She was sure she sang them to herself.

Bras are draped all over Bridget’s room—on the backs and arms of wing-backed chairs, the worn corner of Saka Chandni Chowk—a Punjabi opera record she couldn’t have listened to more than twice. Side one is drum-heavy, each song starting with strings on the verge of screeching, then a man says something measured before the woman comes in with her high octaves. Though sometimes the men strive to join her up there in the height of her cries. The front of the album has a bare-chested man with murky brows lifting a wide sword above his head. He’s about to swing down, and people are carrying the heads of other people. This makes Bridget think they’re singing about battle.

The kettle, yellowed from heat or exposure, is quiet on the counter. Its low, round form saturated like the molting fur of prey in spring. It’s plugged in for tea but isn’t getting anywhere. Bridget pinches the fingers of her good hand against the cord at the kettle’s base. Its sides are cold as when the water first entered it. She pinches hard to wake it up, and an electric surge shoots through her index finger, coursing up her arm and over the top of her brain. She rips her hand away and the backs of her eyes are still.

A tap, tap-tap on the door. Sounds like the stiff tip of a fingernail. She turns to answer it, head frozen like a buried seed on her neck and there’s another tap-tap and a sudden itch from somewhere on her throat. It’s impossible to tell where the itch is coming from—on or under her skin— so she doesn’t scratch as she shuffles towards the pause in sound.

She hadn’t locked the door. Bridget squints at the red-lettered In Case of Fire sticker and turns the knob, pulls the door into her shoulder so only part of her shows. The freckled girl from next door stands there with her hands clasped at her groin, out-turned arms draped flawlessly over her breasts. She looks at Bridget through a red-tart glaze. A bulky black purse juts out behind her shoulder like a wing missing its partner. Bridget squints again to thin her out. The top of her head is the first thing to go missing.

“So,” the girl says. Her black-collared shirt is rumpled—it looks slept in; a thick line of dust covers her arm. “So. Haven’t seen you in the laundry room lately.” There’s something shut and soapy about her face when it moves. It looks washed out, diligent as steel wool.

“No. I haven’t really been sleeping enough these days to get any washing done.”

“Oh. So, what’s happening in here?”

Bridget steps back, holds the door open with one arm and swings the other around the room behind her. “Nothing.” The arm swoops back down to her thigh where it flaps like a dead end. She’s still stiff from the electric shock though there’s no coursing anywhere in her body.

“Oh,” the girl says. “Oh. So.” Copper earrings swing from her lobes. Peeling traces of silver curl out like stunted ribbons. Traces that probably used to cover the whole thing—plated.

“So,” Bridget tries.

“You’ve been listening to me cry. I can tell. There’s a very practical look to your face.”

“It’s difficult not to hear everything you do when the walls are so thin.”

The elevator dings open at the end of the hall. It makes a deep rumble when the door slides closed. Bridget cinches her robe until the sash digs into her stomach, so tight she’d be able to make out each organ if she gave herself the chance.

“I’m headed to a funeral,” the girl says. Bridget’s hidden leg shifts behind the door.

“Oh,” she says, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“He’s in another place.” Something clinks. Bridget looks down to the girl’s fingertips. A metal chain trails down from them, brushing the floor. It’s slipping slightly, like an escape knot lowered from a window.

The girl’s hands spread beyond the outline of her body to display the metal—a necklace. Extended, the chain forms a V and the girl’s lips stretch out for victory.

“It’s a Persian one-and-a-half,” she says. “These things are named after the way the rings link up.”

The way the rings link up looks entirely illogical. Bridget can’t make sense of the pattern. The whole mess has the effect of a gnarled beard. She has an urge to pet the thing, or unravel it. “It’s very—textured,” she says. Soft, pliable metal coiled in on itself.

The girl brings the two ends of the necklace up until they meet. Surprisingly, nothing tangles. Though it may be impossible for the thing to tangle more than it already seems to be. “The latch is a bit of a hack job, but I’m still burying him with it. I can’t not.” Her arms fall below her chest, elbows bent like the caving roof of some rundown tourist stop. She drops the chain into the bottomless purse, each link clinking upon another on its way down.

“Why not?”

“I can’t not. It took him five months to make. All this care. Each coil clamped and cut individually. Can I come in?”

There’s dust around the girl’s breath that stops short when she speaks so it doesn’t really cloud anything but her face. It may just be the stuffy hallway, but her mouth is attracting some kind of particle. She’s looking at the top of Bridget’s ear, and when she steps forward, she’s still looking at it.

Bridget feels the weight in her legs when she steps back—a horse with a full carriage at its haunches. She doesn’t know what her backing up means—a cue for the girl to step inside, or if she was just going to give herself enough room to close the door—but the girl steps in.

As she walks past Bridget, the girl starts to sway like a tissue held to a trumpeting nose. Her motions get thin and subtle. She stops at the hall closet, turns to the light coming through its wooden slats. Bridget stares along with the girl. You can’t really make out what, exactly, is behind that door, but can tell much of it’s piled in disordered clumps below.

“The closet in my place is painted. White metal— no light comes through. I know this kind, though,” the girl says. “I used to live here, before I moved into my suite. It’s much bigger.”

“It gives a good, warm glow to the room,” Bridget says.

“Just like those red bills, remember?”

“You didn’t just mention red ones.”

“It’s that red of the fifty. Stumps the sun.”

Bridget wants to tell the girl she’s said all this before, instead she lays two fingers on her arm, latches her thumb to its underside and pinches as if she were testing a new formation on a beach—a shell, a rock, a shell-covered rock. The girl’s arm is a knot, but Bridget can tell it was that way long before she touched it. Below the dust, the weave on her shirt seems brittle, tight, pursed hard as a whistling lip. It feels so good to grip, put calculated pressure on the wound in her hand, like tying a string to the base of a tooth about to be torn out by the slam of a door.

Bridget lifts her fingers, leans in to look for the pattern of her prints. There’s nothing but a cavity of space—disturbed dust enclosing the finger-sized emptiness.

Somehow, the girl understands the quick touch and looks straight ahead. Then her steps follow her eyes and she walks past the hall and turns into the main room of the bachelor. The light here is dimmer. The girl’s shoulder buckles and her purse slides down her arm. Her wrist flips up, the purse bumping against the barrier, its sway jagged at her hip.

When Bridget asks for the girl’s name, her voice is peeling tape. The girl tells Bridget her name is Deirdre and Bridget gives her own. That’s when they discover they were both raised Catholic, and Irish, and that Bridget must have the Moors in her because her hair is so dark, while Deirdre’s burns so classically red. Bridget lets out that her own name always makes her think of brides, which is strange, as she’s been celibate for almost two years and Deirdre says she understands the association, but Bridget’s name means strength. She tells Bridget she used to read a lot of name books, back when she ironed her hair and thought she might want to have something small as a child as soon as possible.

“I’m like a retaining wall for names,” she says as she drops into the pink chair with a bra slung over its wing. She doesn’t look at the cups, though they hang right over her head. The black purse is in her lap, and she opens it. Her whole arm disappears into its mouth and shuffles around until it stiffens and pulls out a green bottle containing a magnum of wine. She can hardly wrap her hand around it, but sets the bottle on the coffee table in front of her and the same arm reaches into the purse again, this time pulling out a metal cork-screw that she stabs hard into the cork.

“I need a glass,” she says, when the thing pops out. Bridget steps into the kitchen, bare feet sticky against the linoleum, and Deirdre calls out that she better fetch two. When she returns, a glass in either hand, Deirdre is tilting the whole bottle into her mouth, looking at Bridget from the corners of her straining eyes. The liquid slides down her throat, bulging up the front of her neck like the back of a cautious dog. She sets the glasses down in front of them and Deirdre pours wine into both with the finesse of an expert diver—not a drop of backsplash. The amounts are perfectly equal. She pinches the stem, handing the goblet over. Peering down, Bridget sees a glassy outline of her own face in the red murk and asks who died.

It’s difficult to tell what Deirdre’s looking at but it’s not at Bridget. Maybe she’s trying to see herself, in the mirror with the yellow jalopy painted on it. Her head titled high as a reflection would take. Deirdre plants both elbows on either arm-rest at the same time. Her hair spurts past the sides of the chair like a lawn infestation. Bridget sits on the settee kitty-corner to Deirdre and tells her she’s sorry, she shouldn’t have asked.

“No,” she says, “you think I would’ve come here if I didn’t want you asking?”

Bridget takes a mouthful of drink that stops her breath for long enough to catch up. “I don’t know why you came here in the first place.”

“It’s my lover.”

“You came here because of your lover?”

“Yes,” Deirdre says, “because he’s dead.”

“You came here because he’s dead?”

Deirdre makes the sign of the cross and it dawns like bricks that Deirdre must remember a lot more of her childhood than she does. One hard surface after another: kneeling, standing, sitting. The cross paraded in, the cross paraded out. Avoiding the priest’s dry, extended hand when she passed him to the light on the other side of the door’s sullen, engraved weight. Exposed knees quivering in the breeze like eggshells poised above the edge of a bowl. But that’s about it. She can’t even remember the smell of that many candles together in their many rows, but can see them all there— each white pillar melting with a different prayer.

Everything on Deirdre becomes muted fly wings except her mouth—she takes another two sips of wine before she sets the glass down and unzips her purse. The same arm as before reaches in.

“Looks like you’re digging in the mouth of Gomorrah.” Bridget approximates a couple of matching swigs.

“I came here because my lover’s dead and I needed you to ask about it.” Her arm stiffens and pulls out a metal box with a protruding gold anchor on one of its sides—some kind of nautical relief.

Bridget asks her what it is. “He died at sea.”

“What’s that box?”

“He washed up where the mud was soft. He was sinking into it by the time they found him. No one knows exactly how this happened. The waters were so calm that day. His wife told me he usually wore a lifejacket, so the drowning was strange. But I already knew that. He always wore a life jacket and his wearing the thing was strange for a man with his kind of boat—not many do. Not if there’s a motor. I knew all that stuff. That wasn’t why I was fucking him.”

There’s a chain wrapped around the anchor on the box. It weaves behind, then finds its way back to the front. Bridget looks for rust but all she finds is more and more brilliant shine.

“Actually, that’s about all she said to me. Other than that she knew who I was and never wanted to see me again. Imagine when the will was read out. We’re both going to have to imagine it together, as I wasn’t there. I got him.”

“What’s that box for?”

“He’s in here.”

Deirdre swirls her wine and her hair undulates like seething marination, simmering from the bottom up. She swirls the glass in the other direction and the hair settles back onto her shoulders. The stillness releases the reek of soft, oiled carrots.

“In there?”

“He’s in this box. This is his urn.”

The box has the shine of a bleached knife. The kind of shine Bridget would try to catch glimpses of her reflection in throughout the day, just to make sure there was enough gleam to throw her back to herself. The dust from Deirdre’s mouth starts to settle around it and the lustre fades. She exhales again and the urn’s square shape perches as if it’s about to lift off in a cloud, hover above the table, the tops of their heads, their very different hair.

Bridget yanks the side of her bathrobe to cover her crossed thighs.

“Why would you want me to ask about it? Why would you bring that thing in here?”

“I got him. It was in his will.”

A seagull glides past the window. Its out-stretched wings and belly lit underneath by the white glow of the insurance sign on the next block. Bridget watches it soar and waits for it to make a sound until it’s out of sight. They rarely cry at night, not in this neighbourhood.

“Deirdre?”

“He asked me what I thought of the clasp on the Persian and I told him it works. I said, it works.” She eyes the box. “Should’ve told him it was hack, because he died later that day. The same day he gave it to me.”

“Why is that thing sitting on my table, Deirdre?”

Deirdre tops her own glass. Wine spatters the sides of the goblet on its way down. Bridget wants to plunge inside, see if she could get red enough to capsize.

“What’s that thing doing here?”

Deirdre swings her arms to top the other glass. Bridget lifts it to her face before she gets the chance. The bottle circles sharp until it plunks back on the table.

“You know, when he said he wanted to move in with me all I could think of was how many coat hangers he’d bring into the place? What about room? It’s a type of music. The hangers make a clink whenever you reach for something.” Deirdre tilts her glass at Bridget, the liquid slopes towards her like a tongue. “My clothes starting to smell like his, his clothes starting to smell like mine. Always wondered how long something like that would take. How long it’d take to become a kind of appendage. Then breathing would be a trick.” She sets her glass down. “You know, facedown in the mud with a life jacket that’s no help at all.”

Jesus Camp in a Cold War summer. The bunk rooms had those hangers that are closed off with an infinite loop—you can’t take them off the rod unless you tear the whole thing down. That would take a lot of force. New math, it’s applicable. You could really use a good diagram of an infinite loop in times of war.

The metal box stands its ground. It seems bolted to the table.

Deirdre asks what happened to her hand. Bridget tells her the heat in the apartment was broken and she was sitting on the floor at the coffee table, holding an empty mug, rent money stacked in front of her, hair pulled back like a babysitter’s. The cold fusing the cup to her hand in a slow enough way that she thought the glass would imprint and never leave her. So she smashed the thing on the edge of the table, and it shattered. One of the larger shards sliced through the underside of her finger. She tells Deirdre she’s never bled like that before. She bled right through the white shirt she wrapped her hand in.

“When I lifted my hand to see, the blood ran down and coated my arm as if I’d dunked the thing in a bucket of paint.”

“Or glued a stack of fifties on it.”

The stained shirt is bunched like the fallen, desiccated remains of a tightrope walker under the table they sit around. Let red equal red.

Bridget swigs her dregs and sets the goblet down to wait for the swing of Deirdre’s arm. She presses her hand against the glass, and there’s nothing. “I can’t feel my finger.”

Deirdre places a flat palm on either side of the box, as if the metal was between a prayer—intercepting, or conducting it. She lifts it as she stands. “To Deirdre Avery, my last love, I will my urn, and the cremated remains therein.” She looks down at the box in her hands. “It’s like he knew he was going to die.” Her head turns to scan the room. Her body doesn’t move. “I’ll be leaving this here.”

“Leaving it? What? I never knew him. I don’t even know who he is. Why would I want him?”

“He was a local man. They showed his body on tv. No one mentioned me. Fucking me in that corner there was fine.” Holding the box to her chest prevents her from pointing in any specific direction.

Bridget looks at the unmade bed, the exposed blood, the spattered covers trailing down to the floor. She pictures the box left behind in the middle of the room, its metal shining harder than a stove, reflecting all sides of the room and every little thing in it. A point when the box itself becomes all the broken heat and stains that the room can ever give back.

“This is where I lived when he first met me. I was terribly isolated then. This is where we first slept together. This is what he wanted—to stay here, sleep on. Keep him here. I’m leaving the chain with it. You decide how to arrange the two together.” »