Devil’s Lake

The Graduate

All through school I did my piece to keep my brother at bay—burning sage, clipping my nails, dripping candle wax across the threshold of our home—until one night, like the Poe and James I’d read, he disassembled the earth, the stone, pushing aside Mama’s desiccated baby’s breath and the postcards my sister had mailed to his grave (Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong), and walked the dark streets to our house, where he knocked, troubled but not unkindly, which had always been his way, and piled into a dusty heap at the doorstep before I could answer. After all, his journey had exacted a terrible debt, as the necromancer later explained, and I was never the object of my brother’s seeking anyway. But his essence I’d forgotten, examining the bonemeal—its buttons and its threads—on the doormat, the door wide open, like an eye or a yawn.

Katherine Ballast

The daughter of archeologist Elena Maria Menotti is born in the maternity ward of a field hospital in Djibouti, where her mother had followed the trail of Roman General Aulus Tarquitius, who had turned his army the wrong way out of Alexandria 2,500-something years ago without a look back, blood mad, burning his way down the Red Sea and rocketing for the Horn of Africa before he and his wayward legions vanished abruptly from the convexity of history. Elena calls the baby Katherine, eponymously for an English Queen the nurses suppose but who knows? After a week of rest, Elena leaves the hospital to rejoin the expedition. Like Tarquitius, she’s never heard from again; the expedition, it’s said, bushwhacked by splinters of Al-Shabaab or collaterally incinerated in a US drone strike.

Sally Ballast, a young Peace Corps volunteer from the Pacific Northwest, adopts Katherine at eighteen months. Sally’s surreptitious desire for a child, hidden even unto herself, was rooted in a book she had read, alone in her cot, wrapped in mosquito netting, the butt of a flashlight stuck in her mouth like a candle, the sound of the village chortling in darkness—Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick: “The stain of place hangs on not as a birthright but as a sort of artifice, a bit of cosmetic.”

So it is that Sally brings Katherine out of Djibouti to the Clinton district of inner southeast Portland. Sixteen years later, Katherine graduates from Cleveland High School and peripatetically joins the workforce: barista (Second Cup), server (Hopworks), florist (Maggie’s), stripper (Dolphins II), veterinarian’s assistant (Paws on 42^nd, now defunct). Soul-sick, Katherine finds herself in the employ of the Carrey family, who live in an eruption of handcrafted architecture—three stories of bamboo and red cedar flooring, walls of glassy marble—high on Skyline Road. Ostensibly, Katherine’s the nanny to little Jakob and his sister Cynthia, but her function is to the sexual service of Mrs. Carrey, a job which, after six sweaty weeks of the best pay, she quits, stamping her foot on the bright and buffered pavement of the Carreys𔃼 four-car garage, and declaring aloud to a glandular and blinking Mrs. Carrey that she’ll enroll in college come fall, which until this point Katherine has always dismissed as dismally quotidian if not outright blasé.

Katherine is twenty-seven, a junior, despondent and floundering, a sufferer of bad dreams and indigestion, a hater of her face and the boys that ask if they can make her better by way of dinner and drinks. She knows life is bound to improve, she’d just like to know when. It’s winter and raining. The classroom, packed with students, smells of wet dog and shoes, cigarettes and coffee and fog. I’ve scrawled my first name on the chalkboard under the course title, Writing as a Critical Inquiry, which I had no hand in naming. Katherine unwraps the bright blue headscarf from around her neck, cheeks so red from the cold they appear burnt, shoves her arm into the air and says: “Why was I born such a happy, healthy baby?”

The Other

In the tent beneath the left lung of the body, not far from the heart, that’s where he huddles, tending a cold fire of river rock and cedar chips. The skeletal figures of trees hide a river that rushes past camp, travels the spine, and vanishes from what he dreams, in the pockets of his dreams, into a city of foreclosures, houses dark like the jackets of blackbirds, leaves soundless in the night. If a person is quiet enough, that person will hear the river. And if a person can think, that person will consider its water, salty and brackish, and how the fish he’d spear if he carried spears would taste of coal and ash, black slippery thugs of muscle. And if a person could know, that person wouldn’t wonder why the fire is always cold. Because to light one would burn the person, burn her strong as oil and tar, rising up her bones in a scherzo of fire. And he, the Other, left no choice but to flee, run sideways from the lung, past the trees, plummet into the river—fire reflecting corinthians on the surface and on the black bodies beneath, thugs of coal, thugs of ash—and sink.