Three Nightmares

[note: this is the beginning of a story I really intend on coming back to soon, but Situation Normal sort of takes precedence.]

This morning, my landlady called to tell me that she found a new tenant for the empty second bedroom. Her voice was short and raspy on the phone, but I could hear her relief. She was a picky woman, and the last three candidates who asked after the room were rejected for reasons she would not mention. "She's a nice young lady," she said, "so you shouldn't have problems." When she hung up I then realized I'd never lived with a young lady who wasn't family. I wondered what kind of person she might be; if she was enrolled at Rutgers or if she was working in town. Whether she would dirty the bathroom with strewn cosmetics, or clean-freak her way through a full can of bleach in an attempt to battle the incorrigible bathtub. I hoped she wouldn't make things difficult. I became used to the shade of these gargantuan oaks and the pleasantness of the hilly ten-minute walk to the New Brunswick train station and from there a bus would take me to my laboratory on Busch campus. These houses in Highland Park were fossilized but still beautiful; I liked looking out my stuck window to watch the Orthodox kids playing jump rope in ankle-length skirts or chasing each other in the front yard while their parents watched them from lawn chairs, sipping lemonade. Here, it was cheap, my other roommate was friendly, and as a student I didn't need anything else.

When I came back from the lab the next day she was there, sitting in the mauve leather chair with its back to the door. Though she seemed to be looking at the television set, it wasn't on. I realized the house felt so still because she hadn't turned on the lights, even though there was very little sunlight outside. Since she heard me coming in I knew I had to say hello, so I slung my awkward backpack by the doorway and I sat down on the adjacent sofa, groaning as it sagged underneath me.

My new roommate said nothing. She was tinier than the chair itself, with rich skin that approached pitch black and eyeballs that were sallow and jaundiced by comparison. Her left arm ended in a stub where her elbow should've been like a defunct, once-sharp pencil. She wore short shorts that exposed her legs fully, but these were also smooth even though I expected scars. She untied her hair from an insubstantial bun and stared me down for a full two minutes, until she said,

"My name is Mary." She spoke with an American accent, tinted lightly by something else.
I told her mine.

"I lost my hand in a mine blast," she said, and pulled a bottle of Coke from the other side of her seat and drank it from the top, her thinnish lips underneath the spout, obliterating the fizzy liquid. She then went back to glaring at the television set, still off. I knew the conversation was over.




That night I dreamed of lobbed-off arms. Mostly focused on the spot where the skin grew back again neatly over the stub of the part that was wrenched from the body. The grotesque limbs attacked me on their own but it wasn't the force of the attacks that repelled me but the newness of the skin that covered stubs of the old vibrant joints. It encapsulated the death of a once-working limb. I saw these limbs when I lived in India, remembered legs removed at the knees and arms from botched amputations or terrible accidents. Some of them rolled around on mini neon-blue platforms, carting themselves around busy roads just waiting to be killed. For a moment I saw Mary rolling around on this platform, not only her arms but her legs and her torso casualties of the mine. The thing that woke me up was the fact that had this happened to her might be too dead to roll around on the street, waiting for the final blow from a massive water truck. Mary was somewhere in her room down the hall. I wondered if she, too, had these nightmares.

She kept the same perch the next day after I came home from class. I didn't see Mary when I woke early in the morning to walk to the bus stop but there she was again at seven, a bottle of Coke by her side, and the television off. I thought there was nothing awkward about going upstairs now that I had introduced myself but I felt guilty about the nightmare. It was all I thought about on the lab and it was so distracting that my Sir noticed and asked me what on Earth was wrong. I told him nothing, but the feeling stuck. I could not get rid of it even though I tried, so I did the unthinkable and left a half-hour early, and there I was, in the same room with Mary and her arm. Today I tried not to watch her limb but it fluttered every time she breathed or stretched out her hand as she relaxed in the seat.

So I sat on the sofa while Mary swilled her bottle of Coke, gargling and swishing it in her mouth like mouthwash before she swallowed. Didn't she know that the stuff was corrosive and ate at enamel? Somehow I couldn't reconcile the maniacal swallowing with her perfect teeth. White, and not at all crooked.

"Things go OK today?" she said. Her voice was as musical today as it was flat yesterday. It was as if she ripped these words from a song.

"No," I said.

"Where you work?"

"I don't," I told her, "I'm doing my PhD."

"That's not work?" she smirked. She offered me the bottle of Coke; I declined.

I didn't know what to say to that. Fortunately, she filled the silence as she hummed something.
"Commercial jingle," she said, again pre-empting a prompt from me. "for Cola. They played it back home non-stop."

The natural question to follow was where is "home"? but this woman had a habit of pre-empting my questions and I waited for her to say something. After a few minutes I felt silly watching her stare at the television and then, occasionally, at the bottom of her empty bottle of Coke and as I got up she said,

"I lied when I said that my hand was blasted in a mine," she said. I sat back down again.

"Someone had taken it out with machine gun." With her tiny hands she simulated a big gun. Pow! (In my world: Damal Dishoom.) Again, the gushing-blood images in my head would not go away. They came back even deadlier than they had been in the nightmares and my recollections of them at the lab. Mary watched me intently, not at all smiling.

"I am very sorry," she said. "You sick?"

"No," I lied, bravely.

She nodded. "Where you from?" she asked.

I told her about India, and she asked after my family and I gave her the story I gave everyone in this country and in the lab. One mother, one father, an assortment of siblings and a home in sweltering Madras. She did not ask me if I missed where I came from, though that question is always implied, so I thought about the second part of the question, wanting to give her an honest answer. But she hadn't responded honestly about her arm, had she?

"I miss it," I said, finally, "not sure I'd go back."

"Sounds like me and Freetown," she told me. Then she became silent again, staring at the television set.





Mary was from Sierra Leone. She left there when she was nineteen, and now she was twenty-three. Her parents were American; African expatriates who wanted to move back and live there. She had two and a half little sisters; as she said, only half of her made it into the world and she died shortly after childbirth. She did not know where her sisters were or -- she told me -- at this point, she didn't know who her sisters were. She told me very little about herself after that, though I continued to sit on the sofa and stare at her while she stared at the wall after I arrived home from the lab. Sometimes Mary brought infrequent guests to the home as well; one Jamaican kept turning up on the sofa in the spot where I used to sit, his hair nestled under a baseball cap and his wife-beater slightly off white from heavy sweating. These were the only pauses to these fantastic stories about her family. In order to reciprocate, sometimes I told her about my own treks along the Marina beach, the games of jacks I used to play with my siblings, the silly habits of my convent teachers and their obsession with male sexual propriety. When she heard this she looked at me and said, "how useless. I wonder how that worked out for them." Not knowing how to respond to that, I kept quiet and allowed her to carry the burden of conversation.

I came home one day to find her gripping a Corona instead of her usual Coke. The idea of someone as delicate as Mary drinking took me off guard and I tried to find a delicate way to ask after it (short of asking for a beer myself). She toasted me when she noticed I sat next to her and I smiled. I got used to a period of awkwardness before we spoke, which is why she began immediately:

"Stay any longer," she told me, "and you'll meet my mother."

This was the first time she mentioned any guests. I still didn't know whether she worked in town or went to school. I knew that she existed, but she was quiet past a certain time; by six o'clock, she left her living room perch. The sliver of light under her door was the only indication that I had that she was home. She hadn't even left a shampoo lying by the shower curtain or a stack of towels in the shelf above the sink.

After ten minutes I wondered if Mary lied to me the same way she lied about her arm. Nobody came through the front door. I made sure I was innocuous when I got up from the sofa, but as soon as I hit the bottom stair I heard the sound of rattling glass and a pair of heavy footsteps make it past the covered porch and into the house. A large woman in a slash-cut zebra print dress slammed herself through the door. This must be Mary's mother. The first thing I noticed was the severity of her lipstick and the tightness of the cloth that bound her head together. These clashed with her own brutal darkness. Then I realized she held something against herself. From here I noticed the curly crown of a sleeping baby drooling onto this woman's plump shoulder. Its nose fitted neatly into the ridges of cellulite. When I walked back to the sofa I saw Mary clutching her bottle so tightly I thought the glass would disintegrate into her hands and cause her palms to bleed.

"Mary!" her mother exclaimed, her accent potent and earthier than Mary's. She rubbed the back of the baby's head vigorously. "What happened?"

Mary did not reply.

I recognized the same troubled pause we shared daily times a thousand, but her mother kept talking through the silence. "Hi there, baby," she chanted into the baby's skull, "Say hello to your mother." It was supremely uncaring and burrowed deeper into the zebra print covered collarbone.

"Say hello to your baby," she commanded.

"What do I care what it says to me?" Mary said.

The woman thrust the baby into Mary's lap. It started to cry. Mary let it sit listlessly on her fragile lap. Then, a second later, she tipped over the bottle until its glass mouth touched the baby's forehead and then first trickled and then drenched the baby. I stood up in a second but Mary's mother got to the baby first before it even hit the ground, sodden with beer. It seemed relieved that it was back in her hands and out of Mary's lap. The amber liquid trickled onto the tired cracks in the wood floor. Mary's mother sniffed the baby's pudgy thighs for any scent of the alcohol and was so repulsed by it she ran to the porch door and slammed it behind her even more vehemently than she had when she came.

"It's not as bad the last time," Mary said, "Considering."

The smell and the noise from the door still lingered.

"What?" I asked.

I realized that I was screaming. I picked up my backpack and ran upstairs. The stairs protested against my quick escape and for a moment I thought I'd fall through them and into the basement. When I slammed my room door behind me I threw down my mammoth backpack, lay down on the bed and tried not to think of the baby soaked in beer.





But I dreamed about it anyway. It was a difficult image to get from my head. The woman and her cellulite and the baby (was it a boy or was it a girl?) and the trickle of beer onto its forehead, soaked into its curls and stomach like a primeval baptism gone wrong. The pull of the dream was so strong that I could not wake myself up in time to get up to finish the last of my thesis outline. Instead I was painfully conscious of the sun setting and too paralyzed to do anything about it. The smell of decades-old dust burrowed into my nose until my system revived itself enough for me to sneeze, but not much more than that until I heard the short knocks on the door. Without waiting for my consent, the door opened. It was Mary.

We had been living together for nearly two months now, and she did not once bother to speak to me after six o'clock in the evening. "I have a favor," she said.

I watched her.

"You would do that, too," she said, flatly. "Horrible creature." When I continued to be silent she said,

"Forget it."

She slammed the door behind her.




I called my landlady the next morning. Since I moved here I called her only twice and knew very little about her. She advertised the house on the Rutgers off-campus board as "QUIET ROOM LANDLORD NOT ON PROPERTY". To me, this was a big draw. My previous landlord entertained too much and the common areas were always trashed by the morning. I went to the lab smelling like others' hangovers. Eventually I knew I should move out. When I called Mrs. Waters, I felt relieved; the house was unoccupied until she could find me another roommate, she was a cheerful woman in her seventies, lived in upstate New York, and who detested conflict (or so she said). I mailed her her checks monthly, deducted from my scholarship money, and that was it.

I rehearsed what I would say.

("Mrs. Waters," I wanted to ask, "who is Mary?")

Though I got Mrs. Waters on the first try she asked me to hold. And when I held I could hear Mary pacing the hallways, making herself noticed as she had not been for the months she'd lived here. When the Mrs. Waters picked up the line again, she said, "Sorry, dear. That was the Children of Christ Network." I heard the roar of a vacuum in the background. She sighed and then said, "the mission work they do in Africa is startling."

So I took that chance. "Is this how you know Mary?" I asked.

Mrs. Waters tut-tutted on the phone. She shut the vacuum off and whispered something in her breakable voice.

"They found her in Sierra Leone," she said, "I had to do something. Have you ever looked at her?"

I certainly had.

"Can you imagine that something bad would happen to someone like her?"

"What happened?" I asked.

Mary stomped the floor into submissiveness. The wood practically wept.

"Her arm." Mrs. Waters said, still whispering, "It was hacked off with a machete by the men who raped her."



Would I ever really know what happened to that arm?



When I went to sleep I thought about her arm again except this time instead of the smooth stub I saw the open wounds and gashes and sputtering left behind by the unpracticed hacking of a machete. I almost died in my sleep from choking on the vomit.

Mary and I stayed away from controversial topics for some time. [tbc]