1910 #2
Someone extinguished the remaining electrical lights.
Another lit a candle. The committee joined hands.
To her right sat Jenkins, whose palm was a dead fish in her own.
The Colonel sat to Opal’s left. He squeezed her hand three times—a code?
A reassurance? Either way, silence fell upon the room like a tangible thing.
A candle illuminated her face for all to see.
Opal closed her eyes. The darkness comforted her, released the grip of tension in her head.
Were she to make a commotion, throw her voice, perhaps she could create a disturbance enough to make it to the elevator.
At that very moment the elevator dinged again, and Opal could hear footsteps and chairs scraping against the floor.
Opal began to hum. She hummed for several minutes, for she was safe here, in this moment before the moment, as her lips buzzed. The leather band squeezed her head; wires fell like hair down her back. Medusa could turn enemies to stone. You are stone, Opal thought. You are stone.
She sensed the restlessness of the crowd.
She tried to listen, like Madame de Fleur had instructed before she’d pulled her so close their hip bones were touching.
The thought of the woman settled into her memory, and she warmed, then grew hot, then angry.
Why were the things she wanted always out of reach?
Her pleasures only fleeting? Why couldn’t she seem to hold on to anything?
Opal swiveled her neck, as far as the contraption on her head allowed her to move, then she pounded her fist on the table.
Sound carries quickly in a silent room; the thud echoed from the back wall as it bounced.
The crowd gasped. Opal heard the shifting of bodies in seats.
Though her eyes were still closed, she heard a few people shuffling out of the room, their legs moving quickly, then the ding of the elevator—they’d seen enough.
Opal considered the elevator sitting empty on the ground floor.
An empty box. How long might it take to call it back?
Certainly there must be stairs—but where?
Opal opened her eyes again. The men around the table rolled their sleeves like bankers counting cash, except for the Colonel, who scrutinized his Mind Box, watching the needle.
She channeled Madame de Fleur until her body was Opal’s body, her mind Opal’s mind. She was two women at once. She remembered how when Oren came through, Madame de Fleur exhaled, a moan, and Opal had wondered if it hurt to hold someone else inside you, even though she already knew the answer.
Her voice turned throaty and low. She slowed her speech. She’d always been consistently measured, not prone to excitability. Now, she allowed anger to settle in her bones: “You mewling, fly-bitten pile of horse manure.” The crowd erupted.
“This is a public setting,” the mayor said.
“You insufferable minnows. All of you. Cowards. You have no cause, by law. No proof. No legal recourse, and so you resort to public shaming. Go ahead. Arrest her and save her the embarrassment of this spectacle.”
More murmuring from the audience. The police officer in the back straightened, but made no attempt to move forward.
“She’s interfered with business,” said Tuttle, finally. “She’s impeded the sale of a company. That’s tortious interference.”
“This isn’t about that, I remind you,” said the mayor, impartially. “It’s about the medicines. The pills.”
For a moment the room grew quiet. Opal heard the rustling of clothing, then the voice of an Earthshine worker from the back.
“We were sick!” Maria yelled, and the other Earthshine Girls echoed in agreement. “She cured us!” They all yelled now.
“Silence!” yelled the mayor, but at that moment, someone hurled a bar of soap toward him. He ducked. As if on cue, the row of Earthshine Girls stood and threw soap in the men’s direction, the distinctive lavender smell wafting toward Opal, the soap cakes thudding gently as they landed at her feet.
“Ladies, please,” Charles Tuttle now said. He looked toward the Earthshine Girls, toward Amanda Mahooney, and Opal saw it, his quickened breath at the sight of his mistress. His voice softened some. “Let’s be reasonable. We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
She remembered Bertie’s advice: Think of what you can do within your means.
“‘Can death be sleep when life is but a dream?’” Opal said. Her voice was not her own. “I’ve always loved that line. You’re familiar with that woman, aren’t you? Intimately?” The rest of the Earthshine Girls took their seats, but Amanda remained standing.
“I … I … No. She works for me. I’ve never met her personally,” Tuttle stammered.
A pause, then Amanda ran toward the elevator, weeping.
At that moment, it dinged again, as though it’d been waiting.
The sound made the whole of Opal recoil, as though the bell itself had been shoved in her ear.
Something told Opal to look, the same way her eyes were drawn to grotesque sights, like to a dead squirrel being picked at by vultures, its innards appearing stretched and rubbery in the beaks of the birds.
The doors slid open.
Jagr emerged.
The air was syrup in her lungs. Jagr held a newspaper. He looked unwell. He stood boulder-like near the door, which isn’t to say he was strong or immovable, but that now, once he arrived, he didn’t know what to do. Amanda ran past him. The doors of the elevator closed.
Jagr’s beard was gone, and in its place a mustache. His suit, which normally hugged his frame, drooped in the legs, so he resembled a boy in his father’s clothing. He looked so unfashionable among these city folk, in his barn coat and mud-caked boots that hadn’t been scrubbed by her in months.
He set his umbrella in the stand, then lingered next to that statue of that woman, the one with her finger to her lips. What secret was she unwilling to tell?
Jagr took off his hat, revealing thin patches of hair pulled across his head like plow lines.
She watched him watch her, but she felt no power in the act.
His eyes rolled up and down her body, his wife.
The space of time provides clarity, makes one all the more aware of the body’s subtle shifts.
As she had recognized the changes of his body, so he recognized hers.
Still, no one was more familiar with her than that man.
She did not need clairvoyance to know he’d made note of her fuller face and her swollen knuckles and her center of gravity that forced her to lean back in the chair.
Opal tried not to move. Perhaps she could become invisible.
Evaporate. Travel through the air as tiny unseen particles.
The band felt too tight around her head.
You are someone else, she uttered silently.
You are far away. And for an instant—a flash of time too small to be recognized—she thought she’d willed herself elsewhere, the same room but a different time.
Her body calmed. The room brightened. She heard the clacking of a typewriter. The chairs beside her were empty.
She felt unwell. Her condition—Jagr had convinced her of it.
And now he walked forward, closer to her.
“Sir, have a seat,” the mayor said. He stood and threw his arms wide, marking a line with his body.
“She is my wife,” Jagr said. “I’ve come to take her home.”
Opal did not remember his voice being so plain. In fact, she didn’t remember it at all. The mind can do that, willfully forget. It’s what’s allowed the human species to survive.
The crowd gasped. Dixie Ellison scribbled in her notebook. Jagr repeated himself, louder this time. “She is my wife!”
Opal could not see the Colonel, but she could sense him. The audience began to murmur. Someone yelled, “She’s a widow!” and at that several people screamed.
“I am alive, despite her wishes,” he said. He patted his chest as proof. “Stand up, Opal.”
Nobody knew what to do. Opal looked toward Bertie, who was studying Jagr with dull eyes like a taxidermized bird, the kind that hung in the Colonel’s sitting room.
She felt her baby kick. The chair was hard on her bottom, and she had the urge to shift her weight for comfort, but she didn’t dare move.
Tuttle spoke next: “What’s the meaning of this?” He stood now, too.
“My wife. Madame, she calls herself now, I understand from the papers. She’s sick. Unwell. She has a condition. I’ve come to take her home.”
“You mean to tell me you are married to Madame Doucet?” Tuttle asked. Jagr corrected his pronunciation. He stood. Was he delighted? Enraged? Opal couldn’t read him.
Now Jenkins stood, too. Dixie licked the tip of her pencil and continued writing.
“She ran away. Six months ago,” Jagr said. “She tried to poison me. I nearly died.”
Opal sat motionless in her chair, tapping her front teeth, concentrating her worry there.
Only she could hear the click, click, click of her teeth.
She’d read when some women give birth, the midwife places rags in their mouths to bite upon because screaming might startle a baby.
A baby startled at birth would be plagued its whole life with a weakened constitution.
When her neighbor in Gallipolis gave birth, they’d stuffed her mouth with gauze for just this reason.
From her periphery, Opal watched Bertie rise. The Colonel’s gaze was trained on the Mind Box. He took notations, then set down his pencil and adjusted some knobs. He didn’t look up, not at Opal, not at Tuttle, who spoke next.
“Arrest her this instant. Police!” he called. “Police!”
Jagr continued forward, down the aisle. He held his hat upside down in his hands now, like it was the offering basket at church. He was making an offer: “I won’t be pressing charges,” he said. “She’s sick. She has a condition.”
“Is it true?” Jenkins asked.
She tried to stand, but the motion was difficult, not because she was pregnant but because the leather strap encircled her head.