Venus, Part 3
Stalking Venus
chapter 8
by
Paok
The train hit a bump, jolting everyone aboard. Her drooping head banged against the window frame, waking her from the dream. Or was it another nightmare? She realized that Danny was gone – her earbuds had fallen out. The train must have gone past her stop! Not too far, just a few stops ahead, hopefully? No – even if it was just a couple stops, she was screwed. She’d have to get off, switch sides at the station, and go back. There was no way she was going to make the bus connection. She was going to be late. Her professor had a very strict policy on latecomers. She was going to miss her test. Or, even if she didn’t, she was going to be so late that she could never finish it. Could she plead with the professor to forgive her? Would he let her re-take the exam? Surely he’d be empathetic. Right? No… That hard-ass. Of course he wouldn’t.
Oh god. She was going to fail the test. She was going to fail the class. She was going to fail the whole degree. And fail her mom – and her therapist – and Samantha – the class really was a waste of money after all. She always knew it would be. Fuck. Fuck. No. No.
She fumbled with the earbuds, whose wires had gotten all tangled. She rushed them back to her ears. But all she heard was static. The music was still there – but none of it made sense. The drum was just noise without rhythm. The piano was just a sequence of toneless clonks without any harmony or key. It was all just sounds. Was something wrong with her phone? Danny’s voice – his beautiful voice – sounded like gibberish. Less than gibberish, it sounded like raw frequencies, all played at once. Nothing but radio static played from her earbuds. It was eerily quiet, too, like it was echoing from far away, even – receding into nothing. Danny’s music was gone.
She desperately looked around the train car. The ads along the top of the car were illegible, like they were written in another language. The letters had become jagged, lopsided runes. The windows on the train had melted out of their frames. The buildings outside were gone, replaced by a writhing landscape of brick and glass hills, pockmarked with cement and steel bullouses pointing up into the pure gray sky, with no boundaries to distinguish between the earth and the sky. Everything melded together in an impossible gradient. She looked around the train car at the remaining passengers.
Every person was ugly. Deformed. Not even really human-looking – they looked like tall, pink balls of flesh, wrinkled like mole rats, wearing nothing but patchwork scraps of clothing, false plastic wigs draped over their spheroid bodies, with giant teeth protruding randomly. They, too, were melded together at the waists, or what passed for them. Their clothes were stitched into one great cape covering them all. Their blob hands – too many for the number of people – poked randomly through holes all along the cape, along with many legs, some densely hairy, pointing in all directions. Their eyes, peppered all over the wriggling mass, some small and fishy, some resembling large marbles, all stared at her breasts. Some stared with jealousy. Some stared with lust. Others stared with hatred. She looked down at herself – just a blob, almost amorphous, but resembling a washboard of ridges and folds all the way to the bottom. She shuddered as she realized she was connected to the others by snakes of flesh running along the floor. What floor? The train had been replaced by a disorderly mesh of pipes and metal entangling them all. She couldn’t move – she was held in place by the burning hot, twisted pipes.
Where was she? Was she still on the train? She looked at her phone, which was sinking into one of her almost liquid blob hands. The album art was gone too. All around her, she saw nothing but indistinguishable shapes. This was a hellscape. What was going on? She didn’t know what to do. She could barely comprehend what was happening. So she shut her eyes, and tried to think. How did she get here? What led her to this place? Summer thought as hard as she could. She retraced each one of her steps from the morning until now.
That strange nightmare. That gigantic ball of flesh resembled her current hell.
Then she woke up and saw that apricot tree. Its apricots were bitter, fibrous, and hard to chew, not at all like the ones from the grocery store. They were nothing like they imagined. She and her sister had eaten similarly inedible ones in the mud, as kids.
Her cereal. The Lucky Charms, the breakfasts she had shared with her sister. How she missed those happy days of sunshine rainbows, candy… No, her youth wasn’t anything like that, was it? She remembered it very clearly. She was a sad, lonely child. Why do people talk so fondly of their childhoods?
That reminded her of her Dad’s fourth of July party during middle school – how her cousins had pulled at her hair and spat watermelon seeds at her. Her best friend, her only friend, instead of stepping in to help, joined in on the bullying. Her parents did nothing. Over the years, how many friends of hers had turned into bullies? Of the rest, how many had remained?
Or the Danicorns – even they seemed aloof, uninterested in her – that seemed natural, but it still stung. Their meetups were so fun, but they were so short-lived, and the “friends” she made didn’t want anything to do with her otherwise. They were all so cold. Why?
And her sister? As kids, her sister had promised she’d always have her back. She promised. But her sister hadn’t returned her messages in three years.
It was too much. Summer opened her eyes for a split second – and saw the human mass writhing again – it was scarier out there. She squeezed her eyes shut again and returned to her morning.
That breakfast – she hadn’t had any of the strawberries she’d grown. She’d eaten a few and given up. They weren’t as sweet as she hoped. All those hours she’d spent on her hands and knees, digging, weeding, watering, and one cold snap ruined the whole crop. All the sweat and pain she endured, just for a half-yield of measly, bitter berries.
She had hurried to get ready for class, for the exam – she wasn’t able to look in the mirror before showering. She never looked in the mirror these days. She didn’t want to see her yellowing skin. Her bald patches. She couldn’t bear to see herself. Danny’s wife? She was disfigured.
She didn’t want to think about the present, but she couldn’t stop thinking about the past. She thought about high school, and how she spent those five – god, five whole years alternating between the weekday death marches of endless, confusing, incomprehensible subjects, shouting teachers, homework that made her want to pull her hair out, and the weekend days of all-consuming loneliness, sobbing until her face was swollen and painful, hiding her screams in her pillow. Then the fugue haze in between the school years – the mindless summers she spent wandering aimlessly in the city, all day, all night, with nowhere to go, nowhere to be, just baking in the sun, whole months spent waiting for the season to end, almost preferring to be back at school. She was a wandering zombie, unconnected to all things. A ghost flickering in the streetlights, nearly slipping out of existence, blown away by the wind.
She remembered how her heart shriveled up and choked her when the guidance counselor told her she would have to do it all again for one more year. She remembered the intense shame she felt every day of that final year, sitting among the underclassmen, spending every moment hiding in the corner, trying desperately not to be seen by the other students who just last year should have been looking up to her, and how unworthy she felt even thinking of speaking to them – so she never did.
His music had helped keep her body and spirit together. It touched her heart and cradled her soul. Where was his music now?
But she wasn’t sure if there was anything in there – in the deepest recesses of her heart. Where her soul was supposed to be, she wasn’t sure there was anything at all. Maybe she was empty on the inside, just a useless shell, a mockery made in the shape of a human. Danny would open her up, see there was nothing inside, and with slight disappointment, leave her on the side of the road to die, just like throwing out garbage.
But that wasn’t what people told her. “Just be yourself!” they said, “Everyone is important and valid!” they said, “You’re beautiful!” they said. Somehow she knew those phrases didn’t apply to her. They were for other people: not Summer. People would write those phrases on the walls, or post them to social media, but for whom? They didn’t know who Summer was. If they did, they would have recognized her as an empty husk, human in shape alone, and they would have said nothing.
But maybe they did know. Maybe they knew all too well. It was like a trick – a cruel joke played on her, like poking a caged animal with a stick. They ridiculed her because she was less than human.
But Danny loved her. Danny had always loved her, and cared for her, when no one else did. She wouldn’t end up with someone like Michael – because she had Danny, who was perfect, caring, strong, kind. She knew he loved her and she knew he cared about her....
But… She stopped herself. She knew; she remembered; of course she did. She knew exactly why the Danicorns’ numbers had been dwindling. She knew why they seemed to want nothing to do with her, his self-proclaimed #1 fan. She could not repress the memory any longer. Against the nightmarish reality in front of her, it seemed like the gentler alternative.
She remembered that Danny had been accused of sexual assault two years ago by multiple fans. It began with one woman, who made extreme claims, which most ignored. Then, a week later, another fan posted a long, raw exposé explicitly detailing his behavior with her in a hotel room, how she spent the next month in the hospital, and how his media group had paid for the whole thing without question, telling her to keep quiet. Then the floodgates burst and the accusations came out in droves from every country he had ever toured in. Danny had never before made national news. In the end, his media group hired extremely expensive lawyers, and managed to settle with every plaintiff as a class for an undisclosed amount.
In the eyes of the law, Danny had never been convicted of a crime. But everyone knew the truth. Now his increased output and more frequent tours served only to pay off his debts – and fewer and fewer people came to see him. Summer had laughed it all off, and never once engaged with the subject. She couldn’t.
A part of her was jealous, too.
Now, Summer could clearly see the river. It stood in sharp relief against the background of her memories.
She knew that river, but until now, she had made herself forget it. Now she fully remembered that night of her wandering summers. It was one month before her 5th year of high school. Two months into the new endless summer that had been thrust on her. She had somehow sustained herself during the previous one, reminding herself that it was the last one she would ever have to endure. After this, she would join the real world, and escape high school forever. Now two long months more of empty solitude had passed, and one more awaited her.
It was past midnight, so hot and so muggy that she felt feverish, and all the streets blurred together into an indistinguishable mess of brick, cement, orange streetlights, trees and bushes reaching in all directions with sharp and twisted branches. She had been walking for hours; she didn’t know how long. Her swollen feet were covered in blisters and hurt like hell. She had broken into her mom’s liquor cabinet, and was so drunk that her head pounded like mad. Every step she took was a gamble. She stopped for a moment to rest, looking over the railing of a bridge, looking down into the dark and murky waters stretching into an infinite void of deep black. Her thoughts were fragmented and erratic. Danny’s music in her ear seemed like it was being sung by a chorus beneath the tumultuous river below, calling to her, beckoning her, as the waters reflected the streetlights into a mesmerizing mosaic of shifting lights. She leaned over the railing and listened intently, staring into the water, trying to steady her wobbling legs, wondering what sweet dreams awaited her in the bosom of that tranquil river.
The river called to her with poetry and song, in the highest lyricism it could muster. It asked her the weight of every moment in her life, every tear she shed, every failure she suffered, and every shame and mockery; it asked her of every time she was given anger, derision, resentment, or pity; and it asked her whether she had any memories at all of happiness. It asked her if her heart had been crushed under that heavy weight, and whether it begged her to surrender to the river’s calm.
She had also forgotten her mother’s words to her, after the emergency responders fished her out. They were the same words her mother said to her again, later, when she took a sabbatical from school, and wasn’t sure when it would end. Her mother repeated them a third time when her health started to decline, and she became physically weak, and it was no longer clear what was becoming of her.
“Just stay alive”, she said. “It’s enough that you survive. Nothing else matters. I just want my baby girl with me on this Earth. Just stay alive, baby. Just stay alive.”
Along the riverbank, held in her emergency blanket, as if her mother was again swaddling her, her mother’s face was twisted and horrible in her wailing anguish. Summer couldn’t look at her. She wanted to plug her ears so she wouldn’t have to hear her mother’s cries. She was coughing up water and had nearly drowned, but the pain she felt now surpassed those that caused her to jump, though standing along the bridge’s edge, it seemed impossible that she could ever have felt worse. It was even more unbearable now, having caused her mother so much pain. The deep shame redoubled inside her.
Summer decided there that she would not tell her mother what had really happened. She would not reveal the truth to anyone. She would say she had simply fallen, or someone had pushed her, or there was a gap in the railing that she was holding as she walked, so she lost her balance and tripped through it without realizing. It was a miracle she was still alive. She was so scared going down. God forbid she had hit her head on the rocks. God forbid she had drowned.
Summer told almost no one about her brief swim that night, and no one ever knew the full truth.
As the months passed, she even began to believe the lie herself. It was better than the alternative: that shame heavier than all other sorrow. Her mother no longer thought anything of her: nobody did. It was clear from her words. “Just stay alive.” Living was all that she was capable of. Just eating and breathing. Her mother thought of her just the same as her classmates did: as an animal. As a thing that merely lives, and nothing more. If even that was too much for her…
No longer able to yield, and no longer able to admit her shame, Summer overturned herself, as the grief suffused her, and turned her inside out with sorrow.
Now she desperately needed to dream of the cottage again. But she couldn’t. It lay in ruins. There was almost nothing left; it had burned down, and grass and vines covered what was left. The hill was bald dirt. Her children were missing. The river was dry, full of bones being picked over by shrieking condors fighting over every last bit of flesh. Danny was gone.
She felt something on her arm and she opened her eyes. It was a ladybug. The bug was the only thing she could see clearly in the maelstrom of the absurd train. It was crawling up her forearm, tickling her little arm hairs. It clambered all over them – the red-and-black bug. It was cute, elegant, beautiful. It was right out of a fairy tale, a thing of poems, a thing of songs.
She hated it. She hated it. She didn’t hesitate. She shrieked and slammed her hand down on it as hard as she could. A loud smack. The bug was crushed. It cracked apart. Its insides spurted out onto her arm, now wet. Bits were stuck to her palm.
She turned her hand. She saw its black spindly legs, torn apart and scattered around the corpse. The yellow-white splotch of its innards. She saw its caved-in, segmented body. Its beautiful shell and its slimy translucent wings, thinner than paper, were twisted and crushed.
The boundaries between things rushed back all at once. She recognized the train again. She could see the buildings outside. She could see the people inside. Nobody was sitting next to her now. Some passengers were startled by her cry. Some were disgusted by the dead bug. Summer didn’t mind. Now she knew what was under the ladybug. It was dirty. It was disgusting. No lady – just a bug. She wasn’t shocked. She wasn’t surprised or mournful – deep inside, she had always known it. There were no fairy tales. There were no idyllic cottages. There was nothing magical in all the world.
She looked at her transparent reflection in the window, now in sharp focus. Her ghostlike face was juxtaposed over the buildings rushing by. She stared at it: a haggard, sunken face, unnaturally yellow. It looked alien. Her arm hurt like hell – her muscles were burning all up and down her body. Why hadn’t she felt it until now? She hacked and coughed, and felt the roughness in her lungs. She looked around the train car: bored faces, tired faces, annoyed – all manner of hideous humanity. The album art on her phone – a picture of Dan Barley, his face sinking into the shadows. A mysterious smirk over a rough-cut beard, a twinkle in his eye, groping the supple waist of his slender guitar, held suggestively over his groin. Every person she saw, every face, even her own, was horrifically ugly. She hated every one of them. But Summer Weaver, no longer dreaming, was finally free.
Earlier that morning, when she let the ladybug climb onto her finger, this is what it said to her, with all the might remaining in its frail body:
Eat me, Venus!
I submit myself to you!
My giantess!
Eat me, my goddess!
I know you love me!
I know you care about me!
My body is worn; my spirit has faded!
I am worthless now,
accept me as your sustenance!
It had rehearsed these lines for weeks, and shouted them so loudly, louder than it ever knew it could. After its body was crushed, it was conscious for just a few moments. It felt no pain, and its mind dissolved quickly. These were its final thoughts:
Was I wrong... about Venus? ...was she truly… A goddess? ...No… A goddess would not do this… Perhaps that other girl… Yes… Her sister… That sublime woman… That beauty unmatched by all… I was blind my whole life... She was the true goddess…
The ladybug had learned nothing.