“Andrew,” I said. “I just don’t feel comfortable with this.”
He looked sad.
“I don’t mean you. You’ve been very nice. But I’m worried about the guy with the ax. In him, I mean. The second one. It all happened so quickly. Don’t you think we should check it again? Even if the first murder was staged, the second one could be real.”
“Oh. That’s a good idea,” he said. He walked over and pulled the second ax out of the second man’s back.
It looked pretty real.
“It looks pretty real,” he said.
“But what does real look like?” I asked.
“Is anyone here a doctor?” Andrew asked, looking around the room. Nobody was a doctor, or if they were, they were not admitting to it. If I wanted to know whether this situation was normal or abnormal, I would have to be the one to do something; and of all possible situations, this was perhaps the only one that I was actually qualified to deal with. I took the ax from Andrew’s grasp and touched the wet blade with a fingertip. I drew my hand away and touched the fingertip to my tongue, tasting metal.
“Oh, my god,” I said. “This is not fake. We are all in terrible danger.” I tried to say this in a way that was both urgent and calm, but when I saw all the people staring at me, I realized that I had made them only more suspicious of me, the one living person there who was also covered in blood. I looked over at Andrew, and he looked away.
Another scream came from behind me, and when I turned around the woman I had glared at just a few minutes earlier was on the floor, an ax in her back.
“We need to move to another room,” I said.
The other guests reluctantly followed me back to the banquet hall. What to do now? From the dining room, another scream: I already knew what I’d find if I went back there, and I thought to myself that if we followed the rules, perhaps we’d all make it out fine. If we figured out the rules and then followed them. All around me people were beginning to panic, searching for exits.
As it turned out, there were no exits.
We pounded the walls and screamed, to no effect. Some guests went into hysterics, sobbing on the floor, until they realized that nothing at all was going to change. Then they stood, oddly calm. One man grabbed the hand of a woman. “I love you,” he said, pulling her hand to his chest and pushing it up against his heart. “What’s your name again?” she asked. “Jonathan,” he said, “and I love you.” A pause. “Okay,” she said. They clung to each other, balled up in a corner, and as they did, others started to confess things, as well. “I need you.” “I always hated you, but right now I don’t mind you.” “Would you please hold my head in your hands? Just hold it, really grab it, and tell me everything’s going to be okay? Please?” Soon everyone was huddled in corners, except Andrew and me. I tried not to look at him too directly. If these were in fact the last moments of my life, I did not want to spend them in embarrassment.
It seemed like so much had happened, but still nothing had changed. I was back in the banquet hall, covered in fake blood, feeling left out, and looking for something to hold. Andrew was in the middle of the room, watching me, and I closed my eyes and thought about the meadow. This time, I would keep the sheep clean and snowy white. I added a stream and a large oak tree, birds coming to rest in its boughs. It was afternoon there, late afternoon, growing later.
I heard a noise, and I opened my eyes. Andrew was down. Another ax.
The rules had changed: the banquet hall was no longer safe. And with Andrew gone, there was no longer any reason to stay.
“We have to move,” I said loudly to the room. “We have to move on.” The hall had only two doors: one led to the dining room, which was certainly unsafe, and one to the basement, which really seemed like a bad idea, but at least uncertainly so.
“I’m going to the basement,” I said. “We can barricade ourselves in there.” Nobody else said anything. I looked at them all one last time, balled up in their respective corners, and walked down the stairs.
The basement was both larger and cozier than I had expected. The ceilings went high, and the fluorescent lights far above buzzed in a way that reminded me of the outdoors, the outdoors during warmer months, when the air and the ground seemed bright all over with the lives of insects and plants. The space was cavernous, but it was fulclass="underline" there were piles of objects all around me, large piles reaching ten, twelve, fifteen feet into the air. They looked like they had been collected and sorted by someone very patient, someone with a lot of time on his hands. Or her hands. There was a large heap of flannel shirts, mostly plaid. A pile of Time magazines. A pile of athletic equipment, mostly football helmets. Wedding dresses. Gerbil cages.
By the time I found the pile of bloodied nurse costumes, almost nothing would have surprised me. This one reached nearly to the ceiling, hundreds or thousands of white vinyl dresses crumpled and stacked, strewn and sprawled, covered in blood. White nurses’ caps stuck out at odd angles, studding the heap with crisp red crosses.
I found the costumes and I felt, for the first time since this whole thing began, that I truly belonged somewhere. I could crawl into this mountain of white and red, I could hide in it until the danger passed, or at least until the danger came to find me. All the mistakes I had made this night, everything from my nurse outfit to the way I had left things with Andrew: all of it seemed justified, purposeful, in light of this gigantic pile of bloody clothing.
I eased myself in, with some struggle and much noise. The vinyl surrounding me squealed against the vinyl on my body, making a sound like a thousand balloons rubbing together at once. The center of the pile was dark, slippery, and wet with blood, either real or fake. I hardly noticed the distinction anymore: sweet or salty, warm or cold, it was all horrible, and I curled up in it.
I thought about the events upstairs, and who the killer might have been. I thought about Andrew and how nice he had been to me, and how incredibly, unbelievably nice he probably was to people who were dressed normally in normal situations where nobody feared or resented them. What had he been thinking right before he was axed? Had he been thinking about me?
It was horrible, like I said, lying like a dead nurse among a pile of bloody costumes. It was horrible, but at the same time it was not so bad. It was not so bad, and at the same time it was horrible. But there was a feeling building in me now that I hadn’t felt since I’d shown up at this stupid party: I was excited. Something was going to happen. Either this would work, or it wouldn’t. Either I would be spared, or I would die. Either death was something that could be fooled, outwitted, outplayed, or it was not. However things ended, I would learn something about the world in which, for the moment, I continued to live.
Hylomorphosis
Because they have seen angels, and other divine numina, represented by painters with a certain splendour and light, and have heard that these are spirits and are so called by theologians; so that in consequence they think that the spirituous stuff in our bodies must be similar.
An angel faces the painting of the famous angel with sword looming above a battle. Figure blurred out, scene blurred out. The painted angel’s face like a thumbprint, darkened by two depressions, one above and one beneath. The difficulty with describing an angel or its movements: they lack organs of sense or motion. Their bodies defined by absence. The angel facing the painting reaches up toward its own body. Its fingers grope the tranquillity of that perfect head, smooth as a plate. It finds the middle of its face and pushes in. The question is: Can an angel become anything it has not already been?