Tripping the Tale Fantastic Read online

I could have kept you, but I didn’t. I put you back with a quiver in your heart and a dream in your head of a naked girl in a pond. The next day you and your family packed up and left.

  I always wonder if I chose wisely. If sending you back to your world was the best possible thing for both of us. I wonder, but I don’t let it change me. I remain a fox by sunlight and a girl by moonlight. A wanderer. And now—a lover of languages who uses hands instead of mouths. Taken: hundreds of humans. Loved: almost half of them. Deeply loved: five.

  Sometimes I wonder what that means about humans. Sometimes I wonder what that means about me. It’s the meaning that’s important, not the words used to describe it.

  We’ve got to let the things we love go. I at least know that.

  But every eve of the August full moon, I return to that pond and I wait for you.

  ***

  THE EAR

  Willy Conley

  Jessie Sweetwind was out on a five-mile run during a cold twilight evening thinking about her deaf students when she almost stepped on an ear. What caught her eye—and helped make that split-second decision to avoid stepping on it—was the wetness and color of flesh.

  She continued running, the image frozen in her mind, as she made her way up to the top of a hill that marked the run’s halfway point where she would turn around a couple of wooden barrier posts and head back. Should she pass the posts and improvise a new route home or turn around and get a good look at that thing to be sure it wasn’t what she thought it was? A half hour of ambient blue light was left before it would become black. There were no lights along the footpath and the moon hadn’t risen yet. Around and around the posts Jessie ran doing figure eights.

  Eileen should’ve been with her. She usually accompanied Jessie on these runs to fill her in on various environmental sounds like the babbling brook, a drilling woodpecker, or coupling teenagers. Mainly, Jessie wanted Eileen for security—she was big-boned, taught phys ed, coached field hockey, and there was no one Jessie would rather have along than a woman who knew how to throw a block or a verbal attack should danger come their way. Eileen enjoyed coming along since she could maintain a steady breathing rhythm, signing while running with Jessie—both conversed in ASL without voice. She especially liked how signing added a bit of aerobic activity for the upper body.

  Jessie stopped going around the posts and began running in place facing downhill. Usually her body was warmed up by now but she still felt the dull ache of cold in her feet and legs. A month ago while she and Eileen were running side by side, Eileen heard a gunshot and immediately shoved Jessie on the ground not far from where the ear was. Jessie rolled hard down the hill and smacked her head against a tree stump alongside the pathway. Before she realized what Eileen had done, blood streamed down her face turning her world red. Jessie ended up getting ten stitches on her scalp.

  She never saw the source of the gunshot so she had to take Eileen’s word for it. Jessie didn’t like the eerie power hearing people had over deaf people in situations like this; the same kind of power when they lived on both sides of your apartment and heard just about everything you did—grinding your coffee, flushing your toilet, your burps, coughs, and sneezes, all of your private noises—but you couldn’t hear what they did. Jessie knew this because her passive-aggressive neighbor would let her know when she ground her coffee rather early in the morning or when she had been up all night with a male visitor. The woman had the ears of a cat.

  Down below, Jessie could barely see the speck of flesh in the middle of the blacktop. Lined along the path were bare elms with branches reaching out into the night. “What would Eileen do if she were in my Nikes?” Jessie thought. Eileen had called earlier.

  “SORRY ... HAVE TO BACK OUT TODAY ... GOT A EADACHE, GA,” typed Eileen.

  As soon as Jessie saw the abbreviation for Go Ahead, she immediately typed back on her TTY, an old Model 28 teletypewriter converted to allow the deaf to communicate with others on the telephone.

  “A EADACHE? U MEAN EARACHE, GA?” Sometimes the old clunker hit the wrong letters or missed them entirely making Jessie play guessing games.

  “NO, NO ... HEADACHE,” said Eileen.

  “WHAT AM I GONNA DO WITHOUT MY SECRET SERVICE ESCORT? GA” said Jessie.

  “I DON’T THINK THAT’S FUNNY, JESS. GA”

  “WAS BEING HALF FUNNY. AM SERIOUS, TAKE A COUPLE TYLENOLS. DON’T FEEL COMFORTABLE RUNNING BY MYSELF TODAY. GA”

  “NO CAN DO. MUST REST MY POOR HEAD TODAY (FROWN). COULD USE A BREAK FROM EXERCISING,” said Eileen. “WHY NOT WEAR UR HEARING AIDS WHILE RUNNING? GA”

  “RUIN THEM WITH SWEAT? NO WAY! GA” said Jessie.

  “IT’S WINTER—U WON’T SWEAT THAT MUCH. WHY R U RUNNING THIS AFTERNOON ANYWAY? DAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING—UR THRU WITH TEACHING FOR THE AFTERNOON. TAKE A LOAD OFF. (SMILE!) GA” Eileen frequently added words in parentheses to reflect her facial expression at the moment, since the tone of voice got lost through the TTY. Jessie despised them; it made her feel she had no imagination, but she couldn’t tell Eileen that. After all, Eileen showed a lot of effort by purchasing her own TTY and keeping up with issues and trends in the deaf world.

  “THE FACT I’M RUNNING WILL TAKE A LOAD OFF,” said Jessie. She showed her rear end to the TTY. “WELL, UR LOSS ... XXX ... I MEAN, UR GAIN. CAN’T LOSE POUNDS STAYING HOME. GA”

  “DON’T U WORRY—I’M NOT A CALORIE COUNTER. (SMIRK!) GA”

  “HA! U THINK I DO THAT? GO BACK TO UR CHIPS, SALSA AND SEINFELD. GA OR SK?” Jessie stuck her tongue out at the TTY and whacked the side of it.

  Signing off, Eileen typed, “CRUNCH CRUNCH CRUNCH MMMMMM YUMMY YUM, GA TO SK.”

  Jessie repeatedly hit the signing-off symbols hard, the “S” and “K” keys, as if she were poking someone’s eyes out. She hung up and yelled, “Fat bitch!” to the TTY printout. “The third time you’ve canceled out on me this month.” She’d love to know how clearly her neighbor’s ears understood her deaf speech.

  Almost near the ear on the path, Jessie went into a jog. She had decided to run today anyway to compensate for the upcoming Thanksgiving dinner. When family and friends asked why she ran every day, she said it was to meditate, but the real reason was her obsession with staying thin.

  Slowing down, Jessie glanced again at the fleshy object and picked up speed. When she got to the wooded area past the town home community, she saw a Seven-Eleven paper sack blown against a bush. She thought of the film Blue Velvet that she recently quizzed her Lit and Film students on. Early in the film was a scene where the main character, a young, wholesome amateur detective, discovered a severed ear in a vacant lot. He found a paper bag and with a stick lifted the ear into it and took it to the police station, thereby linking the ear to a dark underworld.

  Jessie couldn’t believe such a parallel was happening right now. She stopped, resting her hands on her knees, and breathed hard. What if this flesh thing really was evidence to a crime scene? It wouldn’t be right to just leave it, unsolved.

  She grabbed the Seven-Eleven bag and ran uphill to where the hunk of flesh was laid. Or was it flung there? Cut out from a human being on the spot? A shiver ran up and down her arms. The ear was still attached to the surrounding skin that an ear is typically attached to.

  Jessie took a closer look and sniffed. She couldn’t smell anything rotten; it sort of smelled like raw chicken. The skin was obviously from a white person. Whatever happened must’ve happened very recently. On closer inspection she wasn’t sure this was an ear. It had the shell-like swirl of an ear but it didn’t have a lobe or a curved outer portion; they were snipped off probably with a pair of scissors. Two other disorienting items—she didn’t see any hair above, in, or around the ear-like object. She couldn’t see an opening where there should have been an ear canal—it was getting too dark to tell.

  Jessie had the awful feeling that someone criminal was watching her discover his handiwork. She immediately stood up and scanned the area. No one. She looked around for a stick and found a yell
ow pencil alongside the path. With the pencil’s point, she lifted the flesh into the bag. This felt just like the Blue Velvet scene, reinforcing a point she made every semester in film class that life sometimes imitated art and vice versa. She surveyed the area once more to be sure no one was looking and rolled down the top of the bag.

  Feeling that she had evidence to a horrendous crime, she ran hard in the enveloping darkness switching hands with the bag every quarter mile or so. A conscious effort was made not to wipe sweat off her brow with her free hand.

  Getting close to Columbia’s town center she passed a brightly-lit lakefront restaurant with people eating steaks and barbecue ribs at the window seats. She imagined the horror in their expressions if the ear soaked through and dropped out of the bag. She smiled.

  When Jessie got to her apartment, she put the paper sack outside on top of her woodpile on the back patio. She locked the sliding glass patio doors, closed the blinds, and went to the bathroom to draw a hot bath. Along the tub’s edge, she lit some votive candles and piñon incense.

  For a half hour she planned her next move while vigorously scrubbing her hands and fingernails. If she called the police, they would probably grill her for why she had this piece of ear, especially considering that she was deaf. Why a deaf person of all people to pick this thing up way out in the woods two and half miles away, they would wonder. Then after questioning that, they would size up her body, poke around in the bedroom, look through her bras and panties, open up the medicine cabinet, check out her diaphragm case and sniff it, squeeze the tube of Ortho creme as if it had some connection with finding the ear. The Rodney King beating and the furor over Mark Fuhrman spoiled her faith in cops.

  She held off on the police. Couldn’t call her parents—on vacation touring England somewhere. Her sister—already left for Connecticut to visit her in-laws. Didn’t want to alarm everyone up there. Her deaf cousin Rachel in New York City, actually her best friend since they were the same age—no one answered except the TTY answering machine. A short message was left wishing Rachel a happy Thanksgiving and to give her a call ASAP. Next, Eileen—a problem. She tended to screen her TTY calls. What’s more, she had a roommate and Jessie didn’t trust conveying sensitive information to a machine that displayed words for all eyes to see.

  The only thing left to do was call her friend Troy but that would mean having to use the telephone relay service. Relay agents weren’t to be trusted. They acted as a third party that relayed TTY calls to hearing people by voice and converted voice calls into TTY for the deaf. One of them could pick up on her intelligence about the ear and break the code of confidentiality by informing the police.

  Jessie was going to leave Columbia soon anyway for Philadelphia where she would dutifully spend Thanksgiving Day with Troy’s family. This was not something to look forward to since Troy and his family were hearing. She would have to go through the whole tedious routine of lipreading a bunch of numb lips at the dinner table and putting up with Troy’s lackluster signing skills. He had known Jessie for three years and still couldn’t sign to save his butt. They were on-and-off again lovers which made her suspect his hesitancy to fully commit to learning ASL. At least Troy would be someone to confide in. Maybe he would have a good idea of how to deal with the police, having worked as a security guard for a software company to support himself through law school.

  She called him to say she was on her way. The relay agent must have been tone deaf and illiterate for she kept typing “Roy” and “Tessie,” and misspelling simple words. When Jessie hung up she gave an “up-yours” gesture at the telephone, partly pissed at the agent and partly to avoid the blame for stupidly accepting a Thanksgiving invite six months ago. She lifted the receiver and banged it back into its cradle for good measure.

  Before she left, she brought the paper bag inside. She wiped the bathtub dry and shook the ear out into it. She looked at it up close with her eyebrow tweezers, taking her time turning it over this way and that. It certainly looked like an ear. Underneath the skin were yellow fat globules and dark red muscles that once covered someone’s skull. The whole flesh piece was about the size and shape of a kid’s baseball glove. The area where a canal was supposed to be bothered her. Perhaps it was a birth defect.

  More and more Jessie felt that the thing in her tub was a crucial piece of forensic evidence that police must be scrambling all over for nationwide. If she handled this right, she could see herself in national newspapers positively portrayed as a model citizen (and a deaf one at that) who broke wide open a major crime. That would knock down all those stereotypes hearing people had of the deaf always needing guidance and salvation. Her neighbor would finally see her as an equal and lay the hell off her.

  Jessie dropped the ear into the bag and set it inside an opening in her woodpile. The cold would prevent it from rotting.

  The overnight stay in Philadelphia was blessedly brief. The lips at the table were as numb and dumb as ever. Troy was the same but the turkey was quite good. By three in the morning Jessie was back home in her own bed. She kept waking up thinking the police had entered her bedroom. After a trip to the bathroom, she went to the patio door and parted the blinds. The bag was still sitting in the woodpile opening. Something startling about that ... the whole experience felt like an illusion while driving to and from Philly and yet seeing the crumpled sack again turned it back into a reality.

  Back in bed she recalled Troy coming into his family’s guest room earlier that night. He tried to slip into bed with her just when they were finally alone yet all she wanted was to burst out her secret finding.

  “No, I’m not sleeping with you in your parents’ house. You’re crazy!” said Jessie.

  “Oh, c’mon. They won’t hear us.”

  “How am I to know that? What are your parents doing right now?”

  “What do you mean?” said Troy. “They’re in bed, of course.”

  “Is your father snoring? Your mother turning a page in a novel? Are they talking to each other? What?” said Jessie.

  Troy looked at her with a raised eyebrow.

  “Stop rubbing my leg.”

  “We’ll be quiet like mice.” Troy made an unintentional gesture of two mice humping. He was trying to sign “making love softly” but ended up pumping one fist on top of the other.

  Jessie winced. She didn’t want to be up all night arguing about how he was still so incompetent with her language.

  “Please sit up,” said Jessie. She sat up against the headboard and drew her knees to her chest. “What are they doing?”

  “This is the treatment I get after opening my house and family to you and feeding you a delicious meal?” He was massaging her feet and purposely not looking at her for a reply.

  She clamped her feet together to get him to remove his hands. He sat up and cocked an ear in the direction of his parents’ bedroom.

  She looked hard at his left ear. She zoomed in on it so that all she saw was the lobe, the shell-swirl, and the pink skin surrounding the ear canal. The image of the severed ear came to mind and she overlapped it with his to see if it fit.

  “They’re watching The Tonight Show. I hear Leno’s voice,” said Troy, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Talking about something that—”

  “I found an ear.”

  Troy quickly withdrew his hand. “What?”

  “Yesterday. I was running and found an ear on the ground. Brought it home,” said Jessie. “I wanted to call the police but I’m afraid of what they’ll do with me.”

  “Where did you find it?”

  “Out on the path that goes by the Black community.”

  “You don’t think that a Black person ...”

  “It’s a white ear,” said Jessie. “At least, I think it is. I can’t tell if it’s really an ear or not. What should I do? The more I wait, the more the police will suspect me.” She filled him in on the episode and her fear of cops.

  “I thought I told you not to go running in that area anymore,” said Tro
y. “A lot of crime goes on there, you know that. Didn’t you learn anything from Eileen protecting you when she heard that gunshot?”

  “Protecting? Ha! Sometimes I wonder if she did it for the sport of it,” said Eileen. “Nobody was out in those woods.”

  Troy put his hand up to her head. “How’s the scar coming along? Your hair’s grown back.” He signed “grow” like her hair was a weed.

  Jessie got out of bed and started putting her belongings into her overnight bag.

  “You’re not going home already, are you?” Troy ended his questions by drawing a big question mark in the air, an annoying trait hearing people tended to pick up. Most couldn’t grasp the concept that a questioning facial expression alone denoted a question.

  “I’m sorry I can’t sleep. And I don’t want to be up all night staring at your mother’s country cross-stitchings on the wall.”

  “But you’ll wake my parents leaving this late.”

  “Doubt it. They’re watching The Tonight Show, right? Right?? Besides, I’ll leave like a mouse.” She made a bucktoothed expression and wrinkled her nose.

  “But what will I tell them in the morning?” said Troy.

  “You’re a lawyer. Bullshit your way out of it. If you’re really stuck, tell them the cranberry and sauerkraut are doing somersaults in my stomach. Tell your father I’m sorry I won’t be able to eat his usual wonderful Western omelette tomorrow morning.”

  “You’ve got to call the police as soon as you get back. Get it over with.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and was gone.

  Troy’s remark about getting it over with kept repeating itself to the point that she gave up trying to sleep. The sky began to show a tinge of light. Twilight, she thought. Most people wouldn’t call it that, though. The light looked exactly the same as if it were in the evening.

  Not feeling hungry, she opened her fireplace, made a fire, and sat cross-legged in front of it. Every once in a while she looked out the sliding doors at the bag and then at the phone.