•A Story Of Living Dead Girl•

•Chapter One•

I am haunted by a memory i can't recall. How long has it been since the last time i was home? Four years? A week? How many days have i spent thinking about my friend, thinking about time and consequences, when i should have been concentrating on today, tomorrow, on trying to be happy?
It is fall and the air is sharp. Gabby keeps telling me to slow down so that she can really "see" her surroundings. She wants to absorb this environment, smell the flowers and the weeds and the dead things on the side of the road. She wants to be able to re-create these things exactly.
Gabby wants to make films. She says she can see a screenplay unfolding every mile we drive.
She wants to be my wife. She wants to make me understand that there is artistry in my science.
Gabby is eighteen.
"Can we stop at the krispy kreme?" Gabby asks. "I've always heard wonderful things about their doughnuts."
I've already had a wife, a life; another existence seperate from whatever Gabby is experiencing. She is beautiful, though. Her hair is so long and blond, her stomach flat and tan. A ring dangles from her belly button and when we have sex she tells me to touch it. She tells me hat the belly button is the beginning of life. I know that she is wrong. She tells me that she wants to have my bby, my babies, whatever.
I don't tell her what i am.
Leaves have already begun to litter the streets in gold and red, and when the wind picks up they dangle in the air and i think about how much that used to mean to me: The beginning and end of life. The change of seasons.
"You know they bake them fresh," Gabby says. We've pulled into the parking lot of krispy kreme. "Should we get a dozen?"
"No," Say. "You don't want to get sick on the lake."
Gabby leans over amd squeezes my cheeks. She has an extra finger on her left hand. It's just a nub, really, beside her pinky. I noticed this the first day of class. She was sitting in the front row, drumming her fingers on the desk, and whenever i looked up from my lectern she was beaming at with her twisted genetic code.
"I have sea legs," she says. "What about you, Doctor?"
I am not a doctor.
"Get half a dozen if they're hot," I say. "Otherwise we'll gorge ourselves."
While gabby goes inside to order, I sit in the car. Granite City. Washington, was a logging town when we bought our house near here. Instead of the Krispy Kreme donuts, Blockbuster Videos, and Del Tacos that litter the streets now, there were bars and gun shops and two small grocery stores. We'd fallen in love with the slowness of it. She was going to raise our children at home, teach them from books that she thought meant something. No silly "Dick and Jane" books. She was going to teach them to read from chaucer.
It was silly. It is silly.
We were going to bring them up as people. Teach them as we, humans, had been taught. No state-authorized curriculum.
If they were born with vestigial tails, they would keep them.
They would never be freaks because they would know that freaks are simply the misunderstood. They would understand everything.
Gabby and i have been driving for two days. We left Los Angeles on Thursday, wound through the Bay Area, spent an angry night screwing in Klamath Falls, and then climbed through Medford, Portland, and finally into Washington.
There used to be a small pond filled with goldfish where the Krispy Kreme is now. It wasn't the original pond, though. It was made of concrete and had a filtration system that preserved the ecosystem. It had been built on the soil of an actual "living" pond after Mt. St. helens called the water home. There's a plaque now that tells the history of this parcel of land.
Gabby pops out of the doughnut shop, a doughnut stuffed into her mouth already.
"These are so good," Gabby says after she sits back down.
"They just came out of the fryer. You've gotta have one."
"No thanks."
"I know this is tough for you right now," she says, "but preservation is important. You need to eat."
I take a doughnut.
"I have to figure ou how to capture this taste on film," Gabby says. "Like in Willy Wonka you could just taste everything couldn't you?"
WE CURVE THROUGH a narrow mountain pass toward the lake my wife and I built our house on. Evergreen trees stand tall along the road, and Gabby has her window down to smell them. Is has rained here recently so the air is full of familiar aromas: moss, the smoky taste of damp wood.
"It's so green here," Gabby says. "Why isn't it like this in L.A.?"
"It doesn't rain as much."
"I know that," Gabby says. "But look at all this space. I mean, why can't we just bulldoze some houses in the valley and get some space back. Plant trees and flowers. Import some interesting African crickets or some lions and tiger. Get a little nature going."
"The San Fernando Valley is a dessert," I say. "All the water in it comes from the Colorado River and the Owens Valley. The onlu things that could live there are snakes and turkeys vultures."
"Always the teacher," Gabby says.
I admire her innocence. I do. She doesn't understand what is takes to make life work. She hasn't been taught that animal survival is a miracle. She'll learn.
We're passing familiar landmarks but Gabby doesn't know that, either. It's not her life.
The Branding Iron Café, where my wife and I made love in the men's room. Kenny James was on the jukebox singing about the coward of the country. She'd looked me in the eye and said, "I can feel an egg dropping."
Chance. Natural Selection. Perfecting unknown variables. Drawing Punnet Squares. It came to this.
On the sink, my arm bracing the door so no one could come in, she told me that it would be a girl. We are discovering new places, she said. In my mind I was Kenny Leakey. We were restarting history.
"You could talk to me, you know," Gabby says.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I know I'm probably being distant."
"Tell me something, Paul,"Gabby says. "Why did you want me to come with you?"
This is what we fought about in Klamath Falls, though it was done with different words. This time, I don't think it will end in sex.
"I want you to be a part of this," I say. "To understand what I'm going through, you have to see firsthand."
"Where do you think she is?"
She is my wife. My ex-wife. The mother of my children.
"I don't know," I say.
"Last night you said you loved me," Gabby says. "Is that true, Paul? I mean, is it really true or is just one of those things people say when they want to end a conversation?"
"We didn't stop talking," I say.
Eleven fingers. It's rare. My research tells me that it occurs in only one-third of one percent of America women. The human hand is a precise instrument. Gabby is a mathematical improbability. Inside her, somewhere, is a train of corrupted DNA.
"You never stop talking," Gabby says in a coarse voice, but then leans over and kisses my neck. "Pull over. I want you in the woods."
HERE'S THE TRUTH: i don't love Gabby. Her voice sounds too thick to me, like she isn't completely a woman. When she sleeps, I often turn her over and count the vertebrae in her back. I run my finger along her rib cage, feeling the soft grooves that separate her. Her skin gets hot and throbs. I take her pulse and think that she is moving too fast, that her blood must be running backward.
I think I know where she fits in the scale of things.
She is musty with sweat now. Her flesh smells like an animal pelt. It is the dirt in her hair. The wet grass stuck to her cheeks.
Gabby is just sitting next to me looking at the map, but I can sense movement inside of her. She is ticking.
"I'm sorry," I say. "I thought I knew where we turned off."
"Don't worry," Gabby says. "Just stop drinking from tin cans. I don't want you completely senile before we're even married."
Our rented Chevrolet is parked on the side of the road--a few feet from where Gabby and I had sex. She doesn't call it sex. She calls it "banging." It's a generational thing, she says. I am eleven years older than Gabby. I am old enough to be her brother.
"Let me just get my bearing with this map," Gabby says, "and I'll direct us back out of her."
I know where we are. We are near the place where my wife and I built a house, had children, taught school. It's the place it has always been, but the landscape has changed. This isn't unusual.
At Mungo Lake in Australia, archaeologist unearthed four bodies that were twenty-five thousand years old. People had been walking on top of them for years. Picnics had taken place. There were plants to build condos. All the while these people sat underneath the ground, their history being trampled by men in floral print shirts and women in bikinis.
One day, maybe they will carbon date the condom I threw into the bushes. Maybe they will find traces of children I never had. They will speculate about who I was and how I lived and why I had come to this place, on this date, to have sex with someone I didn't love.
"Okay," Gabby says. "I know where we are."