The Unpleasantness

March 15th, 2020

I am going to write about what happened again. I have not thought about what happened except in the general for many years: that something happened which I did not and still do not understand except that I could not have possibly seen what I thought I saw. I kept a journal when I was at the inpatient program, but I am the queen of throwing out anything that might be of sentimental value, and I cannot find it. Probably, feeling like I had moved on, I tossed the journal in the garbage on a visit home from BU when my mother asked me to clean out my closet. I was messed up for years, I was fine for years, and now the memory is keeping me awake again.

I wish I had that journal. I wonder if I’m remembering it now the same way I remembered it then.

-Hayley

March 17th, 2020

Kit called today. Jerome picked up the phone. He thinks I should stop talking to Kit altogether, but he would never push or argue and he sat and listened patiently while I told him what she’d said over a bottle of Tempranillo. Her call really disturbed me. I hadn’t thought about it for so long, and she called me only a week after the memories started coming back. I didn’t tell her, before or during her call, how much I’ve been thinking about it. It’s weird, and it’s just like Kit to pop up like that. She wanted to talk about a robin’s egg she found on a walk through her neighborhood. She said it felt like an omen. I pivoted, and we talked mundanities instead: her brother’s new baby, her roommate situation, my bees. I could tell she was dissatisfied when I ended the call.

This sense memory came back to me talking to Kit, not even of Kit herself but of the long drives to see her in my Jeep, the coconut air freshener never enough to keep off the musty, wet dog smell I’d inherited with the vehicle. Kit lived two hours south of me, where the identical houses and the ceaseless development and the well-funded public education systems gave way to cow pastures, Civil War battlefields, independent bookstores, and conservative small towns with banners strung high over main streets. Kit’s particular small town still had a drugstore soda fountain. If you ordered a Vanilla Coke, they’d mix vanilla extract into the cola themselves. 

We mostly fucked in cars. We only ever had penetrative sex once that I can recall, despite being supposedly straight, sexually active high schoolers. Our favorite places to station the Jeep were church parking lots in the dead of night. Our justification was that they were deserted, but in hindsight I have to believe that the sacrilegious nastiness got me wet: visions of our worship services still feature in my brain’s masturbation compilation. In a church parking lot, God could watch us devote ourselves to the orgasm and consecrate the Jeep with saliva and cum. Once a month, Kit took communion between my legs. For aftercare-we-didn’t-know-enough-to-call-aftercare we’d snuggle in the backseat, half-dressed, bruised up and blissed out, and read Mary Oliver passages to each other in the incandescent haze of my car’s door lights.

Kit was the first person I’d ever been physical with who treated me like she cared about me and my pleasure, who spent just as much time or more experimenting with my body and asking me questions as she did trying to get off herself, something I didn’t know I deserved. I’m grateful to her for what we learned together, without which I don’t know if I would have recognized what a brilliant lover and man I have in Jerome. 

For my drives to see her I would make playlists and burn them onto CDs. I’d burn an extra copy for Kit, who would listen to them after I went home and text me later to tell me which songs she’d liked the best. I’ve been listening to that music again: The Mountain Goats and Sufjan Stevens and Motion City Soundtrack and The Postal Service. Jerome teased me the other day when he caught me craning over my jigsaw puzzle in the dining room and listening to “Let’s Talk About Spaceships.” I laughed and reminded him that I had mostly gone to high school with white kids; my parents could afford a private high school, and insisted on it.

Kit and I were anguished teenagers with violent experiences living in our bodies: I’d been in a house fire when I was five and lost much of the skin on my face and the grafts had healed in irregular waxy patches, and Kit was a transsexual who had genuinely no idea until her twenties and hated herself with a deep and disorienting passion. Kit’s bullies called her a fag, and mine called me a zombie. I had friends in spite of my otherness, but I don’t think Kit really did until she got older.

Kit came to my place less often, but often enough. My parents liked her. She and my dad would read the same books and talk about them together at the kitchen table, snacking on apple slices and cheese.

Sometimes we graffitied quotations from our favorite novels on the walls of abandoned silos and defunct bridges: You were not put on this Earth just to get in touch with God.

Kit believes we managed to get in touch with something, though.

-Hayley

March 17th, 2020 (cont.)

To clarify, what we experienced in August 2012 was a shared hallucination. And I’m not saying that Kit is crazy. She can’t be any crazier than me, because we both remember it exactly the same way. We did from the start. I guess what I’m saying is that, for some reason, Kit really wants it to have been real. She still brings it up every time we speak on the phone, twice a year or so. She won’t talk about it with her therapist, but I refuse to be that for her. I’ve told her that.

It’s possible that something else happened, the doctors would tell me, that our psyches concocted an impossible fantasy to replace a sickening reality, but I can never remember it any other way. If Kit can, she’s never told me.

We were walking hand in hand in a humid forest, sweating, talking about whatever. What we witnessed was

March 18th, 2020

Sorry. Panic attack. Will try again later.

-Hayley

March 21st, 2020

We had been on a trail which led through the woods and opened up onto a field of tall, dry grass buzzing with heavy white flies. A path cut through the grass, so narrow that we had to walk along in single file; the sun was high and yellow in the afternoon sky, and I felt homesick, displaced by the two hour drive south to what felt like another world in my seventeen year old frame. We swatted at the flies. I caught one behind my ear and crushed it between my fingers and my palm, and I felt its slick insides lubricate my skin. I pushed into Kit from behind, slipping my hands into the back pockets of her jeans. She spun, grabbed my waist, and tugged on my hair. I set the moment on fire by falling backwards off the path, pulling Kit down with me.

Every time I drove to Kit’s I smelled like me, and every time I drove home I smelled like Kit. 

When she came, I spat her discharge into the grass and kissed her on the mouth, our bodies entangled prostrate on the Earth’s crust. We rose, my bare knees dirty below my khaki shorts. My skin tingled. The trees rose up around us on every side, the sky lush with their leaves. I ate a handful of almonds from the leather bag slung over my shoulder. Kit whistled a song from one of my CDs, her hands stuff into her front pockets. The flies grew thick.

Ahead of us the path widened back into the forest. I don’t think this is where we began to hallucinate, but it is true that we were discovered back in the field, and not deeper in the forest where we both remember going. I went back to that field once, a couple of years later on a visit home from college, armed with two of my friends from high school and a can of mace. We parked beside the same trail map that Kit and I had parked beside, but this time I actually looked at it. I brought us straight to the field without telling my friends the truth about where we were going. The trail ended at the edge of the field, the patch of forest where we’d had our episode torn down and replaced with excavators and bulldozers and a sign advertising a new lot of townhouses. I felt nothing.

I remember the trees looking beautiful lining either side of the dirt path, the sun pouring past branches and leaves like golden syrup poured over hotcakes as Kit and I crossed from the field to the forest. Particles twisted in and out of sight, catching the beams of light as they floated. Fuzzy brown vines curled up trunks. A pair of butterflies flitted over a patch of tiny eggshell flowers. We walked slowly, with reverence. 

I caught up to Kit again and curled my right hand around the crook of her left elbow. We leaned into each other. It was cooler in the woods than it had been in the open field, and her shoulder felt cozy against mine. The air smelled like magnolias, sweet and dense and cut with acid. Something rustled in the brush to our left, and we stopped. Or, at least, we experienced something rustling in the brush to our left and we stopped. I don’t know exactly which bits of my memory of that day are real and which are not, except for the parts which literally could not have happened. But something could have rustled in the brush. 

Maybe that’s what set us off in the first place.

“Did you hear that?” Kit asked.

I nodded. I looked down the path behind us and could not see the grassy field we’d come from. I felt strange. We’d only been walking in the trees for a few minutes, and I couldn’t remember the path turning. I thought about my Jeep, parked at least a forty-five minute walk back along the trail. I heard the rustling again and whipped my head around. I saw a tawny shadow dart through the trees. Kit’s eyebrows lowered and tightened, and her face lost all color.

“I’m bleeding,” she whispered, and showed me her hand.

Um.

I’m not totally sure, though.

March 22nd, 2020

No, actually, I am almost certain that she must have been bleeding, and that she must have fainted there among the luminescent particles, because they did stitch her hand up later in the hospital. I know that for a fact.

“I’m bleeding,” she whispered, and showed me her hand. It was splotchy with red, and a crimson line across her palm oozed with fluid. I caught her just as she lost consciousness, propping her limp body up with my own, my brain scrambling to find a way to lower her gently to the ground. I managed to get under her, land on my rear, and pull her down from above.

She came back pretty quickly. I fed her water and almonds from my bag. She had been fiddling with the pocket knife in her jeans when the movement in the woods startled her, and she somehow managed to slice her palm open. I used the knife to tear a strip from the bottom of my t-shirt to wrap around Kit’s palm. I slid the knife into my own bag as we sat there under the trees, Kit’s head in my lap, and I realized that I wasn’t sure anymore in what direction we’d come from. Kit was apologizing. I shushed her and told her to focus on her breath. I had known that Kit was a fainter, and while I had never seen it happen myself, she had told me enough stories about trips to the doctor’s office that ended badly to know that this was not a genuine medical emergency. Still, I wanted desperately to get her home.

And still there was something moving in the trees. It was vaguely deer-like, but it wouldn’t stand still for long enough that I could make it out. And it could not have been a deer. A deer would have run. A deer would not be lurking, dashing, watching. The next time I heard the creature move, I flung a branch in its direction. The noises stopped. Kit set her clammy hands on my leg and pulled herself to her knees. I helped her stand, holding her waist with one hand and an arm with the other, Kit protesting all the while that she was fine. Her face was bone white.

“I don’t know what direction we came from,” I said. Kit looked back and forth down the path and whimpered. “Okay. We’re going this way,” I said, and took Kit by the hand, pulling her in the direction I thought looked brighter, since the sun had been overhead in the field. The dancing particles mocked us in their dizzying snowfall, and I could swear I heard the animal following behind. Every minute that passed I became more and more certain that we were going the wrong way, but Kit began to insist.

“I have a feeling,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

But soon we had been walking far longer than we had been before Kit fainted, and I was growing more and more anxious. I couldn’t stop thinking about the return journey: the now hour’s walk back to the Jeep, the twenty minute drive back to Kit’s house, the two hour trip on the interstate to get myself home.

“K—-, we need to turn around,” I said.

“I’m telling you I have a feeling,” Kit replied.

“I don’t care about your feeling. I want to go home, and we’re going the wrong way.”

“You don’t know. We don’t know what the right way is.”

I turned around and started walking in the other direction. Kit called out my name from behind me. I kept walking. Kit called my name louder and louder until she was shouting, and the beast exploded out from the trees in front of me. I jumped out of the way, and it went barreling past me towards Kit. It was larger than a deer- more like a moose, but with muddy yellow fur. In the brief moment during which I saw its face, I was sure I saw six eyes: two set into the skull where you would expect them, two more on either side of its long snout, and two more still nestled into the hinges of its jaw. The eyes bulged out like a frog’s. It dipped its jagged antlers towards Kit. I took the knife from my bag and sprinted after it, but at the last second the creature changed course and galloped off the path, heading deeper into the forest.

I knew what Kit was going to do a split second before she did it, but I hesitated. She ran after the creature, and I ran after her. We chased past trees, through bushes, under branches, the world whipping by, the shadows of the trees casting us in premature dusk.

I wonder how my life’s trajectory might have been different if I could have stopped Kit before she reached the glade up ahead, where the particles shimmered again captured in beams of sunlight, which drew closer and closer as we ran. I wonder if I would still have spent that September at the inpatient program in North Carolina, drinking tea and unpacking my trauma in a valley of autumnal foliage. I wonder if I still would have put off going to college the following year. I wonder if Kit and I would still have had our tearful goodbye on her front porch after a weekend of packing her things into boxes to a soundtrack of Springsteen albums. I wonder if I would have reconnected with Jerome, the cute geek-rapper I’d met in North Carolina, the only other brown person “healing” in that countryside brick mansion, who I kissed for the first time at his show in Baltimore who I married in his parents’ backyard who gets depressed when reviewers call him “intellectual” (“as if the default rapper is assumed to be stupid,” he says every time) who didn’t even flinch when I first wanted to show him my apiary but gleefully made friends with the bees and got a little weepy when he tasted the honey straight from the hives. I wonder what nightmares I would wake up to in the middle of the night, thrashing and shouting and falling back asleep in Jerome’s embrace, or whether Kit would feature in so many of them. I wonder if Kit would have called me today to tell me that her grandmother, who had always been very kind to me, always sending me home with cookies, had fallen ill one afternoon in quarantine and never woken up.

On the phone call this morning (which I received, blessedly, while Jerome was out on a walk), Kit tried to associate what happened to us with the spread of the virus, rambling about how the thing we saw was sick, how it had sneezed on us, how sickness has been dogging her ever since, how she’d come across that robin’s egg last week. I told her, as I always tell her, that what we saw in the glade was not real. I told her that she needed to talk to a new therapist, someone she would be honest with, someone she hadn’t been hiding a medically critical secret from for most of a decade.

Jerome came back from his walk with a bouquet of wildflowers for the kitchen table.

-Hayley

March 25, 2020

One theory is that we crossed paths with a human being or human beings who did something far too horrible to us for our brains to bother remembering. 

-Hayley

April 1st, 2020

Here is what I saw: the moose-creature stopped beyond a felled tree, in that little glade which had been cleared of plants and brush, particles in the light. I could see a bluish shape cresting over the lip of the fallen trunk. The creature snorted and brush a hoof against the ground: clup, clup, clup. Kit slowed to a walk, but when I called out to her she looked back at me and started running again. She vaulted over the tree trunk lying in her way, coming down heavy on the other side.

The ground shook three times as if the planet’s tectonic plates were shifting. I stopped and steadied myself against a trunk, my heart pounding, trying to catch my breath. A gargantuan shadow swept in, stretching over and past me and darkening the brush. The antlered creature turned to Kit and spoke in a low voice that sounded as if it came from several vocal chords, distinct and dissonant and strange: “You ought to leave this place.”

Kit did not move. The earth shook again, and the shadow moved closer to the glade. The particles grew in number, and their movement became faster and more direct until they were swarming in a frenzy around the blue shape. I ran towards Kit again. Instead of vaulting the downed tree, I slid under it where a ditch left a gap below. I slammed my head against the bark, hard. I ended up on my back with my shoulders and head trapped under the tree and my legs dangling out the other side. I screamed as I felt something clasp my ankles, and I was dragged into the light. The world spun in my dizzied vision. I made it to my hands and knees and vomited, Kit crouched down beside me. A huge thundercrack rang out to my left, and a sharp pain shot through my ear. I turned my head.

It was later in my hospital room, white and dizzying in a entirely different way, that my mother would lean over to tell me that the doctors were treating me for a concussion.

The egg was enormous- at least as tall as Kit and certainly wider- and there was a crack running from its top halfway down the side of its cyan shell, a branching crack that ended in a dozen points across the surface. I can’t remember if I understood it as an egg at the time or if it was only later, in retrospect, that I recognized the event as a hatching.

I wanted to stand. I grabbed a fistful of Kit’s jeans and leverage and buttressed myself on my right leg. Kit grasped my triceps, pulling me the rest of the way to my feet, and held me close to her body. She smelled like grass. Another thundercrack, and the fissures spread lower and wider on the surface of the shell. Right at the top, the shell lifted, attached to a sticky bubblegum web of embryonic material. It lowered, then rose again a little higher.

“I am begging you to go,” the many-toned voice came again. “This is not for human eyes. Your presence here may have repercussions we cannot predict-“

An arm, long and three-fingered and covered in fluids and blood and bits of shell, pushed out from within the egg and reached towards me and Kit. A second, a third, and a fourth arm joined it, smashing and pulling through the surface of their container. Finally a head burst out, all gnashing teeth and with too many eyeballs to count. It sneezed. A volley of phlegm arched and splattered us, our shirts, our pants, our shoes, our faces. A strand entered my mouth. It was thick on my tongue and tasted like magnolias. I tried to spit it out, but it clung tight to my gums.

“This hatchling is sick.”

Finally, we ran.

It was a police officer who found us- a tall, white cop with an endless gap between his front teeth- shivering and dirty in the meadow, broken down in the morning dew. We’d been missing for eighteen hours. According to him, I tried to stab the cop with Kit’s pocket knife, which is how I ended up with that judge’s order that sent me to North Carolina. I don’t know. I don’t remember that part. I try not to dwell on it.

So that’s how Kit and I remember it.

-Hayley

April 14th, 2020

Hayley,

I am writing this entry on your behalf. When you come back and reread this log, I want you to know that I wrote this before you woke up so that you will believe me when I say I also saw what you saw. And I am terrified.

At least, I hope you saw it too.

Or maybe I hope you didn’t.

The doors to the house are all locked, and the blinds are drawn, and you are asleep in our bed. I rubbed aloe into your skin. I am sitting in the rocking chair by the bedroom door with the baseball bat. I tried to call Kit, and she did not pick up.

You were standing in the apiary, your protective gear gleaming white in the afternoon sun, and I was watching you from the back porch and drinking my coffee. You reached your hand into one of the hives and all of the bees came flooding out of all of the hives all at once. They filled the air so thick with bodies and buzzing that I was afraid that you would suffocate. Irrational, but. I dropped my coffee and the ceramic mug with the fox on it shattered all over the cedar slats. I rushed down the stairs towards you, and you came limping through the blizzard of insects, slowed by the bees crowding you and stinging you through the suit, and that is when I saw, lurking in the open field beyond the hives, obscured by a wall of yellow and black, what I can only describe as a fucking monster.

It was so covered in eyes that I couldn’t tell which bulging shape was its head, and arms came thrashing out of its body in a hideous pinwheel, its skin dripping with what looked like snot. It was gliding slowly towards the house. You reached me at the steps, and we made it into the house, the bees stinging both of us in their frenzy.

A cloud of bees came in through the back door with us. I can hear them buzzing around the house now. I killed three that came in under the bedroom door a couple of minutes ago.

You are covered in dozens of welts, Hayley, but you are breathing and you are stable and we spoke before you crawled into bed and you were perfectly coherent and I know that we will be okay. I may venture downstairs in search of weapons and food when you wake up. The propane tanks, I think, are an option. I want this to be over.

I love you with all of my heart.

-Jerome

© Marge J. Buckley, 2020