The Changeling Read online

  I never spoke about these dreams with any kind of specificity, aware that a midnight vision described in hospital lighting immediately becomes a symptom.

  I was afraid the doctors would try to dampen my new antennae with medication; I was afraid to perjure an unutterable understanding by trying to talk about it. And you know, I still am. I felt crazy with love.

  Sometimes doctors talk about this feeling as if it is a temporary insanity, “the baby blues,” from which a mother will soon recover. Walker offers this diagnosis himself, leeringly dismissing Pearl as a silly mommy, awash with hormones, mildly and minorly hysterical. “Your world is one of bodily urges and meanings. You don’t understand anything,” he says. Thomas, later in the book, assaults her with the words with which men of the world, men of reason, have long attacked female modes of understanding: “Lunatic. Bitch.” There is something very patronizing, I think, about the notion of “the baby blues.” The sublime fear that follows birth deserves more reverence than that. Like Pearl, mothers can hear the tidal roar of the “ever-moving” present. They know that in a best-case scenario, time will take everything from them.

  “Children had never seemed reasonable to Pearl. They grew up. They vanished without having died.”

  “My baby. . . . Please, I had a baby. Please give me back my baby. He was in my arms.”

  “I’m having a breakdown is all,” Pearl reassures herself in the hospital, after losing Walker and her true child in the smoking yellow swamp. It says something about our human predicament that insanity would be consoling at this juncture.

  The mistake doctors make is to locate the depression inside the woman, instead of the world.

  •

  “Once, in the very earliest time, a human being could become an animal if he wanted to and an animal could become a human being.”

  Children are children because they exist in their very earliest hour, a long predawn before time and death take root inside their consciousness. Despite being genetically spelled down to their fingernails, every cell shaped by millennia of evolution, they live so lightly in their bodies, unburdened by memories, unbridled by convention. Pearl understands growing up to be a loss that masquerades as progress, the exile that separates humans from animals: “The secret society of childhood from which banishment was the beginning of death.” Part of the pain of The Changeling is feeling the years pass. Time draws these kids osmotically through a membrane, turning them into things like us, adults captured by the brittle carapaces of our egos.

  What might it mean to become less human? To become more childlike, more animal?

  By the final third of The Changeling, a storm is gathering, a terrific and imminent change haunting the atmosphere of the island. It promises erasure and violent rebirth. Thomas, for all his proprietary yammering about his young wards, turns out to have fatally underestimated them. It is the children who show Pearl the way forward, not the other way around. A change inhabits them.

  “Could she be like one of them?” Pearl wonders. “She hoped so. The animal was inside her too, the little animal curled around her heart, the beast of faith that knew God.”

  •

  A few months before my son was born, we went to Eagle Creek—as we do every fall in Oregon—to watch the salmon run. They couple among the wrecked galleons of former salmon, dead and decaying fish, some thinned to a purplish translucence. Silvery costumes abandoned in the shallows. This was where life had disrobed.

  Each time we reach the top of the river, I’m shocked anew to see the ghostly skins moving against the frenzied, amorous pairs, the egg-laying mothers. On this trip, I stared into the pool for a long time. Slowly, embarrassingly slowly, I merged into an understanding: life was going to shuck my skin, and go striding into the future wearing the form of my son.

  In the hospital, I’d remember the huge salmon flipping out of the water, their tails thrashing over the rocks. Shuddering on the narrow bed, I learned that life is as unstoppable as death. In the moment of my son’s birth, my spasming body understood this. Death would come, as resolutely and unobjectionably as anything that happens in a dream. But life would continue.

  “Once,” Pearl confesses, “she had thought that she was crazy and that she might get well. She thought that she had to be herself. But there was no self. There were just the dreams she dreamed, the dreams that prepared her for waking life . . . The children had their lives too, new forms by which the future would be accomplished.”

  The Changeling, as no other book I have read, is illumined by the spark of life, the life that wears a thousand skins. Its wisdom is unparaphrasable. A transformation, as Pearl discovers, can only be experienced. “Have you been sent here to save me?” Pearl asks Sam the changeling son, appropriately terrified by the terms of such salvation. A transformation requires an extinction.

  —KAREN RUSSELL

  THE CHANGELING

  Further than blood or than bones,

  further than bread;

  beyond wines, conflagrations,

  you come flying.

  You come flying, alone, in your solitude,

  alone with the dead,

  alone in eternity,

  shadowless, nameless, you come flying

  without sweets, or a mouth, or a thicket of roses,

  you come flying.

  PABLO NERUDA

  CHAPTER ONE

  There was a young woman sitting in the bar. Her name was Pearl. She was drinking gin and tonics and she held an infant in the crook of her right arm. The infant was two months old and his name was Sam.

  The bar was not so bad. Normal-looking people sat around her eating pretzel logs. The management advertised it as being cool and it was. There was a polar bear of leaded glass hanging in the center of the window. Outside it was Florida. Across the street was a big white shopping center full of white sedans. The heavy white air hung visibly in layers. Pearl could see the layers very clearly. The middle layer was all dream and misunderstanding and responsibility. Things moved about at the top with a little more arrogance and zip but at the bottom was the ever-moving present. It was the present, it had been the present, and it was always going to be the present. Pearl was always conscious of this. It made her pretty passive and indecisive usually.

  She was wearing an expensive dress although it was spotted and the wrong weight for the weather. She had no luggage but she had quite a bit of money. She had just come down from the North that morning and had been in the hotel just a little over an hour. She had rented a room here. The management had put a crib in the room for Sam. When they had asked her her name she had replied that it was Tuna, which was not true.

  “Tuna,” the management had said. “That is certainly an unusual name.”

  “Yes,” Pearl said. “I’ve always hated it.”

  The hotel was close to the airport. Hundreds of hotels and apartments were close to the airport; nevertheless Pearl still felt that she was being obvious. She had never been in this city before but she felt that it was an obvious choice for a runaway. She would check out of the hotel tomorrow and go deeper into the city. Perhaps she would find a tourist home there. The home would have black shutters and a wrap-around porch. Pleasant, portly women would sit on the porch eating plates of key lime pie. She would become one of them. She would get old.

  She felt Walker’s gaze burning into her back. Walker’s smart and silent gaze. Pearl’s stomach trembled. She turned violently around and saw nothing. The baby woke with a muffled grunt.

  Pearl ordered another gin and tonic. For some reason the waitress did not hear what she said.

  “What?” the waitress said.

  Pearl raised her glass. “A gin and tonic,” she repeated.

  “Certainly,” the waitress said.

  Pearl often mumbled and did not make herself clear. Frequently people believed her to be implying something with her words that she was not implying at all. Words, for her, were issued with stubborn inaccuracy. The children had told her once that the sun was
called the sun because the real word for it was too terrible. Pearl felt that she knew all the terrible words but none of their substitutes. Substitutions were what made civilized conversation possible. Whenever Pearl attempted civilized conversation, it sounded like gibberish. She could never find the appropriate euphemisms. Death, Walker had said, is a euphemism. But after all, the knock on the door, the messenger, the awaited guest was not always death, was it?

  Pearl thought so, probably, yes.

  The waitress came back with Pearl’s gin and tonic. She was a pretty girl with blond bobbed hair and a small silver cross around her neck. She bent down slightly to serve the drink. Pearl detected a faint odor of cat piss. This is not fair of me, Pearl thought kindly. Things in Florida sometimes presented the odor of cat piss. It was the vegetation.

  “Why do you wear a cross?” Pearl asked.

  The girl looked at her with faint disgust. “I like the shape,” she said.

  Pearl thought the remark to be a little crude. She sighed. She was becoming drunk. Her cheekbones reddened. The waitress went back to the bar and stood talking with a young man seated there. Pearl imagined them in some rank room after closing hours, spreading dough over their bodies and eating it off in some bourgeois rite. Pearl spread her hand and pressed her fingers hard against her cheekbones. She felt guilty and annoyed.

  She also felt a little silly. She was running away from her home, from her husband. She had taken her little baby and carefully arranged a flight away in secret. She had boarded a plane and traveled twelve hundred miles in three hours. The deception that had been necessary! The organization! People were always talking to her at home, on her husband’s island. She couldn’t bear it any more. She had to have a new life.

  Sometimes Pearl thought she really did not want to have a new life at all. She wanted to be dead. Pearl felt that dead people continue an existence not unlike the one suffered previously, but duller and less eventful and precarious. She had worked out this attitude about death after much thought but it didn’t give her any comfort.

  Pearl sipped her drink worriedly. Until recently, she had never drunk much. When she was fourteen, she’d had a drink, and in the last year she’d had maybe a dozen drinks in the whole year. When she was fourteen, she and a red-headed boy had drunk half of a fifth of gin in a broken-down bathhouse on a rainy summer day. She was wearing a cute checked bathing suit and a pullover sweater. On the wall of the bathhouse someone had carved the words NUT FLEA. After they had drunk the gin, the red-headed boy lay on top of her with all his clothes on. When she woke up, she was uncertain whether she had been introduced into sexuality or not. She walked briskly home and took a very hot bath. Nothing hurt. She kept running hot water over herself. She thought she was pregnant. When it became apparent that she was not pregnant, she feared that she was barren. She had been positive of this until recently. Now she realized she was not barren. Now she had this baby. Walker had given it to her.

  She glanced at Sam once more. He seemed rudimentary but intense. He was a baby. He was her baby. Everyone said that he was perfect, and he was, in fact, a very nice baby. He had dark hair and a sweet little birthmark in the shape of a crescent moon to make him special. Shelly, after she had come back to the island with her own baby, had told Pearl that having a baby was like shitting a watermelon. Pearl would not have chosen that disgusting expression certainly, but she did feel that birthing was an extremely unnatural act. After she had passed Sam, she had gone blind for a day and a half. Her blindness hadn’t brought darkness with it. No, her blindness had just taken away all the things she had become familiar with, the room she shared with Walker, the view of the meadow, the faces and the shapes of them there, and replaced them with unpleasant delusions.

  She had imagined that the child had come stillborn, that it had awakened into life only through Walker’s cry of rage. Walker was a persuasive, striking and imaginative man. Pearl could not dismiss the possibility that that he was capable of such a thing.

  Pearl realized that she was no longer gazing at the baby on her hip, but at the back of the waitress’s head instead. The waitress turned slowly toward Pearl. Pearl raised her arm. The waitress stared at her for a moment and then said something to the bartender. The bartender reached for a freshly washed glass and shook the droplets of water from it. He reached for the bottle of gin and poured.

  Pearl dropped the hand that ordered the drink into a gesture for smoothing her hair.

  Tomorrow she would have her hair cut and try to change her appearance. Tomorrow she would forget the past and think only of the future. Yesterday was part of the encircling never. Tomorrow was Halloween. She had seen it advertised at the airport. They were going to have a party for the elderly there. Tomorrow Pearl was going to make every effort to relegate the gigantic physical world to its proper position.

  The waitress arrived with the gin and tonic and placed it beside the other one, which Pearl had hardly touched. Pearl began to drink them. Her gold wedding band clicked against the glass. The ring was part of the encircling never. She tried to work it off her finger but couldn’t. The encircling never was the world that Walker’s family possessed, the interior world she was leaving, the island home.

  Outside, the sun continued to shine maniacally. Shouldn’t it have set by now? Her hands trembled. Her hands were her ugliest feature. They were square and prematurely wrinkled. She stared at them and saw them curved around a comb, combing Walker’s hair.

  Walker would find her. She suddenly knew that. And if Walker didn’t, Thomas surely would.

  Thomas, her husband’s brother. A man of the world. A man of extremes, of angers, ambitions. He and Walker looked very much alike. Their coloring and weight were the same. Their thick hair, their mouths . . . The difference was, of course, that Pearl saw Walker with her heart. Once, however, Pearl had made a very embarrassing mistake. She had mistaken Thomas for Walker. It was shortly after she had come to the island, late one evening, on the landing outside their bedroom. His back was to her. He was facing the bookshelves. “Are you coming to bed soon?” she’d asked, touching his arm. Thomas turned and looked at her, his gaze flat and ironic, uncharged by love, and then had brushed past her, saying nothing. She had been grateful to him for ignoring the mistake but she had gone to her room, trembling, sweating with fear. And she had sat there, looking at objects in the room, not grasping their purpose or function anymore, very frightened, her desires and basic assumptions in doubt. Lamps, baskets, photographs, little jars of pills and scents. What were they for? What did the faces of things represent? What was it that she was supposed to recognize?

  When the door to the bedroom had opened, later that night, Pearl had firmly shut her eyes.

  She said, “Walker, I saw Thomas in the hallway tonight and I thought he was you.”

  The figure in the room approached and stood over her. Pearl had raised her hand and touched the chest’s smooth skin.

  Walker’s voice had said, “The difference between Thomas and me is that he doesn’t need women.”

  Walker’s remark had not reassured Pearl as to the recognition of her desires. She didn’t want to be needed by any of them. On the island there were a dozen children, more or less, and five adults. Thomas, Walker, Miriam and Shelly were family. Lincoln was Shelly’s husband. He had been her teacher at college. From the way they told it, Shelly had kidnapped him.

  Pearl supposed that she herself had been kidnapped as well. The family certainly did things in an unorthodox way. Shelly’s baby was just a few days older than Sam. They’d named him Tracker, which seemed a pretty absurd name to Pearl, although she guessed that she had named him in some wacky way after Walker. Shelly had gone off to school and come back with a husband and a baby. Lincoln was a pompous fellow who sniffed excitedly when he thought he’d made a point in conversation. Lincoln’s true predilections were uncertain, but he was nothing if not an adult. Pearl was never sure whether she should count herself among the children or the adults. The shirts or the skins
. Wasn’t that a phrase?

  Pearl sipped her gin.

  She spent most of her time with the children. They were always seeking her out and speaking outlandishly to her. Pearl felt that they had driven her to drink. But that was all right. They were just children. She was fond of them really. What had driven her away, what had made her feel that she couldn’t bear it on the island for another day, was Thomas.

  Pearl did not want her little Sam to be influenced by a man who could snap a child’s mind as though it were a twig. She blamed Thomas for what had happened to Johnny. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone else that Thomas was to blame, but it was very clear to Pearl. Johnny was a sensitive child and Thomas had pushed him too hard. Thomas thought Johnny was bright and he was determined to make him brighter. Johnny’s loves were peaches, bottle rockets and sitting on a stool in the kitchen helping his mother, Miriam, make cakes. He had been a nice little boy, wistful and impressionable but with simple needs. He couldn’t stand the weight of all that junk Thomas put into his head.

  Johnny was six years old but the last time Pearl had gone into his room and looked at the bed, she hadn’t seen a little boy of six at all, but a lump of white that looked like rising dough with a face tucked in it of the hundredth day of gestation.

  The last time Pearl had gone into the room she had seen ants. There, in a committed procession, had come a hundred ants. Miriam had seen them too. Miriam had said that they shouldn’t become alarmed. Had not ants come to Midas as a child and filled his mouth with grains of wheat? Had not insects visited Plato in his infancy, settling on his lips, ensuring him powerful speech? Pearl sweated. Pearl hadn’t known what to say.

  Johnny had started dying, or whatever it was analogous to it, two months ago, in August. August was the month when Sam was born. August was also the month for the birthday party. The children had always celebrated their birthdays collectively. At the birthday party, Johnny had announced that he felt inhabited. He was inhabited by hundreds. There were cells in his body and all stronger than he. He couldn’t keep them ordered. He couldn’t keep them pleased. In the middle of the party Johnny had gone to his bed and hadn’t gotten up from it since. He lay with his face in the pillow, his poor little body like a graveyard in which the family dead of several generations had been buried.