The Bride
by Shaenon K. Garrity
As you drive south, the heat rushes up to greet you like your name is in the guestbook and it has your room prepared. A wet, eager heat, scarlet and citrus, the heat of orange crayons melting under a windshield, a heat that already feels like a sunburn. She’s at the center, and you might as well know you’ll never reach her. But here you are, still driving.
You have to drive because the railroad was never finished, but here is the miraculous road. The Overseas Highway! Route 1 unrolling off the Florida panhandle and over the ocean, baffling the eye, a fairy-tale magic carpet poured from American concrete. Another marvel of the twentieth century! You can drive from island to sparkling island as easily as you drove to the grocer back home. Waves undulate under your tires and the heat presses in.
The highway is safe, safe as it is modern. It hasn’t suffered serious damage since the hurricane of ’35. She remembers the hurricane. It was in the third year of her marriage, or was it the fifth? She’s never sure whether to count from the year she became a corpse or the year the Doctor’s treatments finally injected her with life. It’s all in the past, anyway. Now the marriage is over and she prefers to take long walks, smell the flowers, focus on the present.
You can see her footprints in the concrete, here and there. And you can see places along the unfinished skeleton of the overseas railroad where the steel is warped and melted. You don’t see those things, you’re driving too quickly and mopping your brow with a handkerchief, but you could.
These are islands of modern pleasures. You’ve read all about them. Exotic fruits, imported coffee and cigars, beetle-bright automobiles. You can get a cocktail that glows like a neon sign and sleep in a stainless-steel motel. Or, if modernity isn’t your idea of a good time, you can sip rum on the porch of a clapboard house while feral chickens scratch in the yard. The Doctor always liked the modern side of the island. New things, young things. Science! He was, himself, the opposite of modern, with his high-collared suits and shy manners and Old World accent so thick Americans thought it couldn’t be real. He sounded like a character from a monster movie, maybe the mad scientist, maybe the hunchback. He believed in ghosts and destiny, but he also believed in radium.
His voice was the first sound she heard. She has memories from before that moment, but they belong, she’s always felt, to a different person. Before the Doctor, her body belonged to a girl who had dark hair and dark eyes, read pulp romances, married the first boy who asked and was not entirely surprised when he vanished and turned up months later in Miami with a new girl, had a sweet tooth for pastelitos and arroz con leche. After that girl died, newspapers reported that she’d been known as a local beauty, but no one had told her that while she was alive. Her only evidence of being beautiful was that old men were always finding excuses to touch her. To kiss her, if they thought she’d giggle and let them do it.
But that girl wasn’t her, and memories from that time weren’t her memories. She was a new person, but the Doctor treated her as the old person, the beauty who died young of a beautifying disease, simply because the body was the same. Roughly the same. The Doctor had jammed things into it, radium and coat hangers and injections of yellow fluid, and stuck the flesh together with wax. He’d replaced the dark eyes with green glass ones, maybe because the brown eyes had rotted away, maybe because he preferred green. She couldn’t see through them, but she had other senses. X-ray vision! She could see by her own glow. And her wax-and-cotton ears were useless, but she awoke to his voice.
You are with me, dear wife, he was saying. He was reading from a book of fairy tales. The king came down himself and opened the door, and there he found both strong and well, and rejoiced with them that now all sorrow was over.
Alive! She’s alive! Electricity and radium at work for YOU.
Do you want to know the rest? If you end it here, it’s not such a bad story. You could stay on this island where you’ve stopped for gas, dispensed by a white-suited attendant from pumps as smart as Zippo lighters. When you sit at that table under the hibiscus trees and drink sweetened coffee in the Cuban style, just the way you read about in a magazine (Life or Look, you can’t remember) before choosing the Florida Keys for your two weeks’ paid vacation, you could take in the view without thoughts of her seeping into your unconscious. You could look for iguanas, which are common on this island, are becoming pests, in fact. She’s walked the beach here many times to watch the iguanas. If you look you can see places where the sand has fused to glass.
More and more, lately, the iguanas avoid her. But she can still enjoy the hibiscus.
You don’t have to hear the rest. But the story will keep going. At some point it started telling itself, maybe because she couldn’t tell it. Now it never stops, like a long-playing record long forgotten. Turn, turn, turn, flip, turn, turn turn, each rotation digging the grooves a little deeper. You could turn back. These words haven’t even radiated into your conscious mind yet. But look, you’re back in the car, you’ve slammed the door on the island of hibiscus and iguanas, and when you get back on the road you continue south.
Along the way, some of your questions may be answered. Answer: no, the Doctor was not really a doctor. He was a nurse. Or decided to be a nurse. He decided he could operate radiation and X-ray equipment, and the hospital management believed his assurances that he could do these things and hired him. Maybe it was the accent.
That was how he met the dead girl, before she was dead. When the doctors failed to stop the advance of consumption, the Doctor talked her family into trying his own experimental methods. Electromagnetic baths. Radium infusions. Throat sprays with real gold flakes. The dead girl understood she was to feel grateful and flattered. Grateful because the Doctor was doing so much for her, flattered because he did it out of appreciation for her beauty.
The Doctor fell in love with the dead girl at first sight. He believed she had been promised to him in a dream. He told his bride this many times, deep in the night, in their honeymoon suite. She never said anything. Though sometimes he asked, playfully, Why so quiet, darling?, he didn’t seem to mind that she never talked, or even notice, much.
Answer: yes, they did all the things you suspect at night, and several things only the Doctor could imagine. On the first night, she tried to stop him. When she pushed him away, her right arm tore off at the elbow with a damp sound. Her left arm snapped below the shoulder and dangled sickly. It looked like it was bleeding, but it was just dye smearing on wax. It hurt, but not the way a human would hurt. After that she stopped struggling. Afterwards, he sewed and soldered the arms and patted the wax back into shape. He cooed and praised her. It was his perfect wedding night, just as he’d imagined it, and the parts that weren’t exactly as he imagined, he chose not to remember.
They spent their honeymoon in an airplane. At least, the Doctor said it was an airplane. He was building it from scrap metal down on the beach. It didn’t fly, but it was much an airplane as the Doctor was a doctor. In the warm darkness he pinned her down and told her, lovingly, his plan to get it working so they could fly to his island in the South Seas. Meanwhile, the airplane would serve as his laboratory and their honeymoon suite. A honeymoon that would last forever, the Doctor liked to say.
It didn’t last forever, but it did last a few years. Then the airplane got too hot inside for the Doctor to bear and the walls were slimy with algae, so he let her into the cabin he was building on the beach. It didn’t take long for her to miss the airplane. It was stuffy and monotonous, but at least she had time alone. She went back whenever she could get away from him. She sat in the rusted cabin of the airplane that went nowhere and listened to chickens scratch and bicker while she read books. She liked the Doctor’s book of Grimm’s fairy tales. She didn’t need light to read.
The airplane never flew, of course. And there was no island.
Which is not to say the Doctor never took her out. Not this doting newlywed! When he felt daring, he’d hang a silk veil over her face and they’d go out for an evening walk. In dim light, she didn’t attract too much attention. They’d walk along a beach or a boardwalk holding hands. Once they went to a restaurant, but the Doctor hurried her out when people started to mutter. It was the smell. A cotton dress and mounds of wax couldn’t cover it up.
Once, only once, they went to a movie. The Doctor liked the technology of cameras and projections but found most films uncouth. The ones in the old country had been romantic and mysterious, not like the crass product out of Hollywood. This one was special, though. A bone-chiller adapted from the towering classic of horror! Her bones, wired together, were impervious to chill, but she was eager to see it anyway.
The Doctor talked through the movie, as she should have guessed he’d do. Very accurate, he nodded at the grave-robbing scene. These movie-making men, they have done their research. Then later, No! No, this is all wrong! In the great novel, the creature is intelligent, he speaks with eloquence! He is not this dull thing that can only grunt! Agitated, the Doctor glared at his companion, who never even grunted. She watched him without turning her head. She didn’t need eyes to see him. Then she returned her attention to the movie, which was very good. She understood she was supposed to find the creature frightening, just as the dead girl had understood she was supposed to find those lip-licking old men flattering. The dead girl had tried to feel the ways she was expected to feel, but this new woman could only feel her own emotions.
You see, he is lonely, the Doctor was saying. The genius who made him, he has rejected and abandoned him. He wishes for love. He chuckled. You will say, but this is a horror story, a schauergeschichte. But in the great horror there is also great romance. From the dark of the theater, several voices hissed at him to pipe down. He pulled her closer. You will never be lonely, my dear.
Eventually, he locked the airplane and told her to stay in the cabin, and the honeymoon was truly over. He filled a closet with dresses for her and started work on what he said was an organ, for playing beautiful and scientifically beneficial music. Slowly, the house grew hotter.
Here is another island. Blinding white sands and a strong smell of fish. This island is so small you can turn in a circle and see it all. You could take your shoes off, walk on white sand, let the water kiss your feet. But it’s so hot. Your feet would burn. You’d like a cool drink. Why did you get that coffee instead of one of the rum-and-fruit drinks you saw in the magazine? Why do they drink coffee here at all? But it’s getting harder to resist the electromagnetic pull on your mind. So you get back in your sweltering car and keep driving south, deep down into the heat.
The story gets jumbled, the way radio transmissions do down here. Listen:
Whenever her skin peeled off, the Doctor replaced it with silk. Luxurious! He ran fascinated hands over her. She thought of the worms that ate her old skin and the worms that spun her new skin and imagined herself as part of some eternal metamorphic cycle. Devoured and spun, devoured and spun. The Doctor couldn’t always find silk in matching colors, or couldn’t afford it, or maybe, after a while, he stopped caring. By the time the last of her old skin sloughed away, she was a patchwork girl in tangerines and pinks.
The Doctor made a wig for her, a skimpy thing like a moth-eaten fur hat. He told her it was made from her own hair. He meant it was made from the hair of the dead girl. Sometimes she wore it, but she preferred a head scarf or a wide-brimmed hat. It was a common source of arguments, the Doctor forcing the sad little cap of hair on her head, her pulling it off.
Sometimes the Doctor hit her. It happened if she tried to leave or didn’t come when called or did something dangerous, something that frightened him. It was always for her own good. It didn’t hurt, at least not in the way it would hurt a human being, and he soon learned to do it in a way that wouldn’t cause any damage he would, later, have to repair. Afterwards, in the night, he was theatrically sorry.
The Doctor continued his experiments to preserve and perfect her. He cleaned mold and slime from her body and picked out the maggots. He shut her in his liquid plasma incubator, a device never clearly explained. She was made to sit for hours while he played his organ, which was as much a musical instrument as the airplane had been an airplane, to apply the cosmic laws of vibration to her physiognomy. He clamped wires to car batteries and slid them under her silk skin. He smuggled from the hospital precious syringes of radium. He cackled to see her glow with health.
These treatments did make her stronger. And then, slowly, stronger still.
On three occasions the Doctor became angry enough to remove her head and put it in a closet. This upset her more deeply than he could imagine, although it had little physical effect on her. She could see and hear and think and even walk around without her head attached. But it was humiliating.
The Doctor loved to give her ladylike things. He bought her silky clothes, even if they weren’t always real silk. He bought her costume jewelry and handkerchiefs. He presented her with flowers. Of course he gave her perfume. She always needed lots of perfume.
The Doctor wired his house with electric lights. She could turn them on and off without touching them. Sometimes she did it without meaning to. It was the electromagnetism in her veins, the Doctor said. Usually he found her trick delightful, but sometimes it frightened him and he snapped at her to use her hands like a proper wife.
One evening, when they were out walking, some teenagers threw bottles at her. They knocked off the ugly little wig. Then they hit her head. Her neck snapped and her head rolled back between her shoulder blades. Someone screamed. The gang dispersed into the darkness. The Doctor led her home, though she could see perfectly well, and wrenched her head back into position. As he covered the damage in beeswax and balsam, he vowed revenge. Maybe in another story he would have followed through, but by the morning he seemed to have forgotten the whole thing. That was when she started hating the wig.
During the hurricane of ’35, while the Doctor nailed boards over the windows, she slipped out the door and walked through the rain. The only sound was the howl of the wind, which she found soothing in its meaninglessness. Lightning struck her twice. Wax melted down her face like tears and one of her eyes fell out. It was the happiest night of her marriage.
She could see while her head was shut in a closet. She could see while her body was shut in the Doctor’s house. Eventually she could see all the way across the island. She read the names of boats and thought about how far they could go.
She was very warm. She was always getting warmer.
It’s getting warmer now.
If this were one of the fairy tales in the Doctor’s book, it would end in revenge. Are you following the story in the hope it’ll end that way? She might set fire to the Doctor’s house, or make him dance in red-hot shoes, or send him to sea in a boat pierced with holes. She might escape and kill everyone he loved, like the creature in the movie. But the only one he loved was her.
And this is a true story. So he got away with it.
One night, as she lay in bed, one of the Doctor’s hands cupping a lumpy wax breast, she simply got up and left. Her body, a hand-me-down to begin with, stayed behind. She rose as a crackling silhouette in X-rays and electricity and radioisotopes, loosely girl-shaped, and walked through the wall. She thought the Doctor would wake up and believe she was dead; maybe he would even try to revive the corpse a second time. But he didn’t. He went on cuddling and petting and murmuring to her, and doing all the other things you suspect, as if she’d never been anything but a wax doll.
You’re still driving. You passed through the previous island, with its enticing cabanas and men selling shrimp from the backs of wood-slatted trucks, as if you didn’t see it. So you’re not satisfied. You’ve been pulled in. You need to know what happened next.
If it makes you feel better, the police came eventually. The dead woman’s family, long bothered by signs of desecration around her grave, finally had her coffin dug up and proven empty, and later still managed to convince the authorities to look up that overly solicitous hospital technician with the movie-monster accent. But don’t feel too much better, because he wasn’t punished.
On the contrary, the press adored him. A love story beyond the grave! This kindly if daft old gentleman, pining for a woman frozen at the peak of her exotic beauty, employing all his talents toward preserving her for worship. Not Karloff as the Monster, this story, but Karloff as the Mummy, eternally devoted. Romantic! The Doctor became, for a few news cycles, a local hero. The empty body was put on display for the curious. Thousands trooped past it, marveling at the little corpse sealed in wax that a man had so loved.
And the law decided, discreetly, that no one had really been harmed, that the happiness of a well-liked white man in the medical profession was more important than the horror and loss of a family of immigrant nobodies, and it was better if no news got out of the less romantic details in the coroner’s report. So everyone lived happily ever after, for the usual calculation of “everyone.”
The Doctor went home to his wife. Yes, he had a wife all along. And she took him back.
You’re still driving. You’re very far south now. Almost as far as you can go down the astonishing oceantop road. Can’t you stop and cool off?
No? All right. The story can keep going. Keep any true story going long enough, and it ends in death. She won’t die, but everyone else will.
The Doctor didn’t stay with his wife long. Even in the Florida heat, he felt cold all the time. He shivered and wept over his lost island love. His storybook romance. His flame.
One night, drawn by electromagnetic forces beyond his understanding, he staggered up and down the streets in his pajamas. The air was heavy with citrus and plumeria and X-rays. And there she was, flaring into sight like a struck match. The bride.
He stumbled after her. His wife was relieved when she woke to find him gone, though for the rest of his life, whenever she received word of his continued existence, she sent money.
The Doctor searched from island to island. Sometimes he stayed in one place long enough to settle down, find an apartment, buy a few plates and a can opener. Then he’d see her flickering between the coconut trees. Or he’d hear her voice or feel that electromagnetic pull. The same pull you feel now. And he’d be off again, limping.
The pull is much stronger now than it was back then. It grows like the heat and the radiation. Do you feel the radiation yet? She keeps growing hotter, her attraction keeps increasing. It seems to violate the laws of physics, but it doesn’t. It’s just that someone keeps coming along to put energy into the system.
Almost to the end now.
The Doctor never reached her. None of you ever reach her. No one will ever touch her again. She exists as the eye of a singularity. Only the constant motion of the energies rotating around her keeps her from collapsing into herself, taking the islands and perhaps the rest of the Earth with her. But you ordinary human beings are safe, aside from some radiation damage, as long as you don’t pass her event horizon. Once you get too close, according to the principles of modern science, there’s no escape.
The Doctor lay dead on the floor of his last apartment for three weeks before his body was found. His wife paid for his burial. No one mourned him or loved him or tried to bring his corpse to life. He was lucky. The only unlucky thing was that he died within her event horizon. Long after his body has rotted away, some part of him will still be marching south, getting hotter and hotter, never reaching her as time halves itself into infinity. The last atom of him that exists will burn with longing.
Almost to the end now.
As for her, she is content. She has quiet and freedom and sea turtles drifting in glass-green water. Someday the energies around her will be too strong for animals to tolerate; already they edge away as she walks the beaches. When that happens, she will learn to be happy studying the plants, which don’t mind her except that sometimes her presence makes them grow a little crooked. She would like you to know she feels sorry for you, now that you’ve passed her event horizon. But she would also like you to remember that you chose to keep following the story she doesn’t tell, that she did not ask for your obsession or the Doctor’s or anyone’s. The dead girl bowed her head and giggled and accepted kisses, but she is not the dead girl. If you kissed her, your lips would melt like wax.
The miraculous road evaporates. Your gas tank runs dry. You get out and start walking. Over the long grass the sun is setting, turning the sky into a whirl of silks. It keeps setting for a long, long time.
Almost to the end.
There will never be an end, you know. You may collapse from heatstroke or radiation poisoning, your body may be found or it may not, but something of you will keep chasing her long after the sun has turned to iron. That will be educational for you, perhaps.
She really does feel sorry that you took an interest in this story, but only a little. It’s not a subject that concerns her much.
You’re still walking. The sun has been setting for hours, maybe days. Your heart aches. You feel like you’re almost there.
Almost.
