Charybdis and Scylla
by Roger Topp
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION.
Because neither Olive nor the cat comes when I cluck my tongue, I poke around the upstairs rooms. I cross the bridge and I climb the tower. The carpet is deep, but the rooms are cold, as if surrounded by sky. I think Olive has gone to bed, but the beds up here are empty, half of them made and the other half—there’s no telling how old these mountains are. They are weathered and crusted in ice. They are shot through with caves and infested with trolls.
I smile at the open windows, because I know Olive—still. She has become someone else, but I recognize her behaviors the way I sometimes catch my father in the mirror. The open windows are an accident, a gulp of bright, clear air from days ago. She forgot to shut them before the storm. I love that and close the windows carefully so not to disturb the walls of snow captured and suspended by the screens. Still, none of the rooms contain Olive—or the cat. I poke the odd mountain to check.
I can hear the cat, crying out from a distance, as if down many corridors. Perhaps it followed Olive back from the bath. Perhaps she shut it out of the bedroom she is now using. I should fall into a couch and have done with it, fall asleep, which won’t be difficult, but I want to make sure
Olive is here and hasn’t walked to the neighbors, as if she has used up all of these beds and now that’s where she sleeps. We’ve done these things to each other in the past.
***
The airport pickup went five kinds of wrong. The plane was late and the blizzard wasn’t. Olive waited 40 minutes in the car while I sat on the runway and finished my first-class wine. The pilot apologized while the snowplows failed to clear us a way to a gate. Olive left her car three times to scrape ice and snow from the windows. I sipped at still another glass and refreshed my phone every few minutes. In the middle of Olive joking the pickup queue was having a tailgate party and my joking we were going to get the pilot to use the engines as a snow blower, Olive taught herself how to reset the car’s clock radio. It had winked at her for months, ever since she changed the battery. I watched her replace in the fall, defeat the alarm system, and check the starter. I took the opportunity then to tell her I was going away for a while. I needed to spend some time in the east, working. She shouldn’t wait up, as it were, but by then we weren’t living together. Olive came only back home only when she wasn’t sitting a house.
Finally, the plane rolled up to the gate and Olive cheered, and I cheered and up-ended my last glass plus one. Olive aborted cleaning out her glove box. No new messages on the phone. Far to the east, I expected Penny was still asleep.
Even before the plane was late, the plane was late. Olive planned to drop me at home, but the roads there are days away from being plowed. Because she is house-sitting, as always, and there are rooms to spare, she took us down the storm-abandoned highway and then back along her own twelve-inch ruts, white knuckling, and praying no idiot came the other way. We didn’t talk much on the way up. The worst of the storm had passed and the clouds were clearing out as fast as they
had moved in. “It has bedrooms,” Olive said, at least twice, in case that was my chief worry.
***
Typically, I make my bed, and not well, moments before I climb into it. In the dark, not a lot of thought goes into it, unless I’m dithering, eyes half shut from the jet lag, that blunt-object head trauma you can’t quite remember what you did wrong. I cannot tell bed from sierra, an un-pluffed pillow from a blue mountain lake in sifted moonlight. I don’t know the house, just the creature that lives here. Olive. The cat’s still alien and we haven’t been properly introduced.
I don’t know the cat’s name, but I should find it. Night is getting on. If the cat is hungry, it could already want breakfast and then whine about it well into the morning. We in the west will be stuffing pillows in our ears as Penny of the east makes her bed, rubs her eyes, and pads downstairs in Breedlove pajamas. I check my phone. Time zones. Hours. The weekend. I message Penny about a song I heard on the plane, just a couple words of the lyrics. She will know the one. It’s about heroes, and waiting, but I’m terrible with names.
The furnace is a whisper tiptoeing across carpet. A single, sharp cat’s cry stabs out like a bat’s acoustic ping. Perhaps it is killing something. Apart from that there is just the tick of a clock and a faint electronic song from somewhere in the walls—another alarm, a microwave, a clothes dryer stopped from bouncing my shoes around? I try to follow this last and go back down into the kitchen where the light is noisy and orange. The piezoelectric tune is farther away.
Knowing the door to the basement for what it is, I explore that one, but I am wrong. It is just a closet, stocked with water and batteries and canned beans. The closet is all hard surfaces and I can hear my own heartbeat. I close the door as quietly as I can, telling myself I’ve been a burden and to get over it. Everyone is already on to tomorrow. In the witching hours of the morning, I do
my best. The house has more rooms than a hotel.
***
Olive got us back to her gig, the off-season B&B, without once running off the road. High fives in the driveway. Her hands were cold. Olive gave me a ten-second tour without taking a step. “There’s a cat. It’s friendly. It’ll wake you up if it’s hungry, like claws in your cheek hungry. There’s a kitchen. Food’s fair game. Washer, dryer. Give me your shoes. Good to see you. See you in the morning.” After shaking the snow loose from my jeans, I went back out to shovel the walk, because there would be another by morning, because it gave Olive time to disappear. I borrowed a pair of boots standing behind the door.
***
I don’t want the cat sneaking up on me. When I find the right door, I close it behind me. Back on carpets I can breathe. The narrow stairs corkscrew down like pasta, and I could almost make the mistake of using the shelves nailed into the sloped ceiling as a set of ladder rungs to lower myself into the dungeon. Two are bare as a house for sale. The third holds a book of matches and a small collection of ivory figures, vaguely human, scrimshaw and their eyes painted black, all of them with at least one arm held up in protest. “Go back. Go back. Go back!” They all agree. All three shelves are a little loose on the brackets and rattle worse than castle doors. Where the stair splits, I go left. The electric tune is louder here. I flip on the lights and everything feels colder for doing so. I turn them off and wait a minute for my eyes to adjust before I take the next step.
***
From the east coast, I messaged Olive to tell her I’d met someone. She returned the favor. Neither of us shared names. Olive made things sound temporary and then miles apart and then wedded at the hip. Too early for a spring fling, she called it a winter sprinter. I wanted her to pry. She did not. She wrote me about the B&B and asked if she needed to check on home now I was coming back soon.
***
When I first met Olive, she lived underground. The house was a hobbit hole entered through a tunnel that twisted about under culvert ribs and ended in a small, wooden, but otherwise regular door. The house was tiny, with a tiny kitchen and tiny cabinets tucked everywhere they could be tucked inside of a hill—and a tiny wood stove and a slender stack, and a tiny ladder leading to a tiny loft with a tiny bed above. I can barely remember sleeping in it. Downstairs, all the windows were hung in one wall, a patchwork of bright rectangles. Tiny voles ran along the outside of the glass, along an expressway trail, through a high forest of chives and oregano. The cat of the month was pinned to the window, a statue working its jaw like a French automaton.
Would have thought I’ve done this enough I should learn to leave the right breadcrumbs. Houses are not posted like airports or patterned like wilderness and city parks. They are matryoshka dolls, relationships with seven layers of intricacy. My phone rings as I’m about to open the next door on my search for—what? My thumb cuts the sound with the quickness of a gunslinger. “Hello,” I say. “I think I’m about to get myself lost.”
“That’s no good,” she says. “How far are you? I need the ride.”
“Hi Penny,” I say. She pauses and I can imagine her eyes checking her phone and reading my bright name. It probably says I am far too far away to give her a ride.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I misdialed.” She sounds flustered, like she’s fighting with a dress or a revolving door and a very large bag. I ask her if she’s all right and try not to sound like the dispatcher for a tow truck. Are you with the vehicle? Are you in a safe place? Did you remember to put your coat in the car and warm boots in the trunk? The noise on her end sounds like Zilgian alloy and polyester static. I think about the storm and the poor roads from yesterday—no, two days ago now, two different storms a thousand miles apart.
It is late here. It is very late where Penny is and she not wearing pajamas. “New adventures?” I say. Is hers the kind of storm that makes the distance to a terminal gate feel like the other side of a great, white lake, the kind of storm that stops you from getting home, so you need to hole up in a dangerous place and step very carefully, not to wake the sleeping beasts and the legends you told all your friends were a thing of the past?
“Same adventures,” she corrects. “I need to get home.”
“Where are you? You’re already in tomorrow.”
“A party,” she says, her voice brittle. “Same party, different party. How do you know? One ends. Another begins.”
I can’t answer that, but I think sleep is a part of it. “Can you call a cab?” I say.
But she knows how useless I am. “A friend can get me,” she says, because I had to come west.
“Grab a cab. Then call your friend. You’re on your way home. Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Wait. Don’t go.”
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying on the line until you get into a cab.”
“I hate cabs.”
“I know,” I say.
She pauses and I resist asking if she’s still there. I could invite her to say, “Yeah, but you’re not,” but there’s something wrong with my phone. It’s already grown hot against my ear. A second later she says, “I have to get to the door.”
There’s a darkness between a man and a bedroom door, and there’s the darkness between couples separated by mountains and oceans. I imagine her groping blind. I want to warn her that there may be a cat. There could seriously be a cat. While I’m waiting for Penny to say anything, I open the door in front of me. Inside, a brilliant shaft of blue moonlight makes a squashed rectangle across a bed and the floor. This bed’s sheets and comforter are twisted into a knot, like a whirlpool has drawn the bedclothes into a central funnel and then being spent, left them stretched and wretched. On the floor, there’s a bag with clothes spilling out and a set of light weights in the corner. The weights have value, and their numbers glow in the dark.
“Will there be cabs this hour?” she says.
I look at the phone. It’s early there in a way that hurts my eyes, but I have no idea how long she’s been awake. “Always.” I say. “You’ll be fine. Do you have people there?”
“Jeff’s here.”
“Is he conscious?”
“I don’t think I can deal with him right now.”
“Okay. Have we talked about him?”
“We ran into each other,” she says. She’s whispering now. “Told you about the socks and the hi-hat?”
I shake my head, which is of no use to her. I sit on the wrecked bed but get right up again. “I’m lost,” I say to her. “I’m in a basement trying to find a door back to the kitchen. There’s
bedrooms here and I think I should just turn-in on the spot and see if I can find my way out by the light of day.” But that’s bad advice. One should not play musical chairs with unfamiliar architecture. “Hey, is the moon full where you are? Clear skies or are you still in the thick of it?”
“I’m finding my shoes.”
“Shoes are important,” I tell her. My feet are bare. My socks are in a dryer somewhere, having been pummeled by shoes. “But something about the beds here disturbs me,” I say. “They have the quality of being slept in, and used up.”
“Beds? Whose house?” she whispers. “Big?”
“Monstrous. I have no idea who the owner is. Still, I’m sure I could hit all parts of it with an arrow. Are you at a house or an apartment?”
“An apartment,” she says. It sounds as if she is slipping her body into a tube-sock, slipping on shoes, sweeping keys or jewels or chains off the floor.
“That’s good,” I say, imagining she has millions of people within earshot. I’m not so lucky. “House keys?”
“Yes,” she says, jingling them and then cutting off the sound with her fist.
“Look for a slice of light near the floor,” I say, and Penny laughs like breathing, like a smile, like someone trying desperately not to say something inspirational. She sounds like someone who needs to scream for joy but, baby is hanging on to a lifeline with her teeth. I’m not going to think about how I can imagine exactly what she sees on the other side of the country, but we’ve all awoken in a strange apartment in the early hours. “Go outside. Look for yourself. Take all forms of ID. This one is sort of roundish. There was a terrific storm here—too. Gone now. Got your phone?” I ask, and she pauses for a moment.
“I love you,” she says, then “Sorry.”
“Keep smiling. Get your shoes on? Get to the door. The light is the door. The handle is just
where your hand expects it to be. It opens side-to-side, not up and outward like in your dreams. Open the door. Keep smiling. If you see him, keep smiling, wave goodbye, keep talking to me. Find the heaviest looking door and go through it. Each door after that will be heavier still and harder to open until, there are no more doors. Outside will be a hallway. Don’t stop when you get to concrete. Stop when the cab smells so ripe you think you’re going to puke.”
“Thank you,” she says, and I swear I can feel the gust of air that one sanctimonious door shifts as she pulls it open, the meat hook on the inside, the soft slap of dress shirt, jacket, and slacks, the clink of a cufflink, the rasp of a hinge that sounds a thousand miles away. I hear only the parts of the song that carry over the phone. It translates as voices shouting and the noise of things hitting other things. There might be a—of course, a trap-set. Now I remember. A good drumhead will talk as soon as you enter the room. I pray that she doesn’t run into it.
“The hallway will be lit and there will be many doors. All of them will be closed. There will be a carpet. Look for stains in the pattern. Walk. Do not look at the doors. The eyes below the numbers will move and they will slow you down. Do not read the numbers. You don’t need to know where you’ve been.”
“I’m in the hallway.”
“Ignore the elevator. It’s pretty but slow and at this hour makes the sort of noises that will cause you to doubt yourself. Avoid mirrors, which is impossible. The stairs are posted. It won’t say stairs, because no one knows what stairs are anymore. You will go down, but now watch the numbers. Do not go too far. Take it easy. Gravity will do the work.”
“Thanks,” she says and I think I hear another sound, a door or a voice. It doesn’t matter. It’s not lyrics. Either way it’s a great, kind, and outstretched hand coming softly to rest on her shoulder. “Thanks again.” Somehow. I can hear her heels on the carpet, which sounds all wrong. I check again the name on the phone. I have to look at something that’s not moonlight or a twist
of sheets. “I’ll call you tomorrow,” she says.
That’s too far. That’s a ghost tapping me on the shoulder to get me to turn around. The phone blows me a kiss to say I can put it away. I let it fall to my side, and I watch the great twisted funnel of bedsheets swoop up from the mattress and settle again. The whirlpool moves slightly now as if it’s breathing. I have to stare before it’s obvious there’s a woman in there. “Sorry, didn’t know you—.”
“Shhh,” says Olive. “You’ll wake the house. Come here.”
With my knees on the floor and elbows on the bed, I bend down to a small cave that has opened in the flank of Charybdis. Warm, humid air pours out. She says, “I’d invite you in—.”
“No. I understand,” I say, and she puts a hand out of the warm hole and around my own.
“Is she alright? Your friend?”
I cannot think of what to say. I travel east. I travel west. I lose sight of both. It should be harder to get back to something I’ve neglected. I put my head down onto the raw weave of the mattress. It is rough like a diaper, stippled like a thermal vest. It could absorb an ocean. A second arm snakes out of the center and glides up and over my head, cradling my neck. The whirlpool pulls closer until it has a head and hair and that head and hair presses itself against mine. I push my hands into the whirlpool until they find its warm shoulders.
I fall asleep like that. Not for long, but I fall asleep. I smell terrible and I never sleep on my knees and elbows, but it’s a start. When I jerk awake, my arms are wrapped about my own head, and the whirlpool has withdrawn back into itself. I’ve been swallowed by the wet guts of Charybdis and then spat out. Now I’m cold and alone and I don’t know if the soft parts remain or if I’ve woken next to a sloughed shell, a discarded skin. She could be somewhere else entirely, larger and more powerful than before. I am sure this is the case. I remove my weight from the bed as a magician might remove a cloth from between place settings and a table. I make myself
light, and I go quietly back out into the damp of basements, pulling the door closed behind me.
I open other doors until I find the bed that suits me, and on this, my just-right, untouched landscape, the covers are at least laid flat if not carefully fit. In this house, there are probably far fewer rooms than I will remember in the morning. The pillows are small but I’m beyond caring. I pull myself out of my clothes, which are too long worn and something very recently exposed to the insides of a jet plane. In the morning, I will check my phone a lot to see if Penny has left a message. For now, I climb inside the thin web and pull everything towards me. I turn slowly, imagining I can find east in the dark, and as I fall yet again asleep it occurs to me that Olive and I might have exactly the same habits. Maybe she will visit later, when she finds me gone. Maybe she will search all the rooms before finding mine. Maybe she will reopen the windows to see if I’ve gone out that way, leaving only a crude and sloppy trail in the snow drifts. Maybe she will give up and settle, this time, for a futon and a warm cat, and tomorrow we’ll cobble together brunch and only talk about what’s not in front of us. I pull the covers over my head and make a cocoon. Now I could be anywhere.
END
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Previously from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and North Yorkshire, Roger Topp lives in the boreal forest of Interior Alaska. He went north for the nightlife and received an M.F.A. from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He once performed a play at Drexel. He once won a national championship in fencing. By day, he directs museum exhibitions and travels to write and photograph research fieldwork funded by the likes of National Geographic. His writing has appeared in more than a dozen publications including ZYZZYVA, The Maine Review, Dunes Review, Into the Void Magazine, Bennington Review, andWest Branch. Read more at thewellandthewicked.com.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Steven McCrystal lives in a town called Bo’ness in Scotland. He started painting in Art Therapy and found the creative outlet very beneficial. It helped him come to terms with the traumas he’d been through and enabled him to look at his troubles in a different light.
McCrystal enjoys painting abstract art, but his repertoire also consists of emotive work and elements of his bipolar experiences. He has found that there is nothing better than feeling an emotional connection to the art he produces and hopes viewers of his art find that same connection.