The Magnetic Girl. Jessica Handler

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СКАЧАТЬ or a tradesman happened by of a Saturday afternoon and noticed through the window an unattended boy, an absent girl. I arranged a line of chairs around the divan to protect my brother like a cage.

      Undoing my boots so my footfalls wouldn’t distract Leo from his toy, I crept away, thrilled by my planning. At the study door, I turned the handle quickly, and slipped into the room. The door hinges didn’t squeal, the frame didn’t scrape—a grant of permission, at least from the room itself. The single window streamed a burst of sunlight onto the bookshelves. My father arranged his books tall to short. His ledgers squared to the far edge of his desk calmed my racing heart. In this room, all was as it should be, perfect and controlled. I wondered what my father believed when he watched the field and the fringe of trees from here. Did he pretend, like I did, that we owned it all? His presence clung to the air, a scent like sour teeth and flatiron starch. Five years had passed since he had asked me to help with his accounts for the church or the store, me reading numbers back to him as he flicked his pencil tip against the pages of a ledger. When I had been very small, I drew pictures in the empty spots in those almanacs and histories, happy in his company.

      I hadn’t helped him count since the day Leo fell.

      I listened for Leo’s conversation with his soldier. Even the distance of two rooms between us was a laxity on my part. No cry of frustration from dropping the man to the floor, out of reach and out of balance, no shouts of glee as the soldier fought a blanket or a weak fist.

      The books, spines out, seemed to have their backs turned to me, but those books who didn’t want my company would be the ones to tell me what a train ticket looked like and how a person chose a destination. If that person’s brother wasn’t imperfect. If she wasn’t a person who kept silent about the day she dropped him, the day he hit his head. Leo, in the parlor, was silent. He might have fallen asleep, solider in hand.

      Turning out the Bulfinch, the Shakespeare, an almanac or two, I came to a book with a red leather cover. Involuntarily, I pushed my thighs together as if my body had made that color. The book’s title was The Truth of Mesmeric Influence. Below that, in somber black letters, the author’s name. Henrietta Wolf. A book by a lady writer. Surely a novel, but why tucked away here I couldn’t fathom. Momma likely hadn’t read this one. I would beat her to it.

      To my dear reader—the first chapter began. Being the dear reader, I rested for the moment in my father’s chair.

       I am capable of affording testimony. The atmosphere around my head was not like smoke, nor fog, but a kind of sunrise or glare directed only at me.

      I thought of how the sunlight over the sidewalks in town made my eyes hurt when I was a little girl. Like me, this author suffered under a glare that no one else saw.

      I turned a page.

      She wrote of curing blindness in an elderly woman, of hearing words articulated clearly before the speaker had opened his mouth, of being overcome by a heat wave in a chilly room. Like me, devastated by a wilting heat after I’d captivated Mr. Campbell.

      Cautioning myself to be gentle with the brittle paper, I turned page after page, devouring her words like a meal.

      She had been imprisoned by aloneness. So had I. Her empathy moved me to tears. Sufferers are many, she wrote.

      In the parlor, Leo was searching for me. As if I were at his side, I saw him elbow himself up from the pillow, and crane his neck to find me in the doorway. His come get me rustled in my ears. I’ll be right there formed in my mind and flew toward him.

      I needed to know if Henrietta Wolf had stilled a wild animal or made a teacher stumble at his chalkboard. The book wouldn’t fit in my pocket or palm like a pin or a button. I couldn’t bear to leave The Truth of Mesmeric Influence behind. Henrietta Wolf knew me deeply. We were dear friends already, and I had read only a few of her pages. She understood suffering and silence, and her words were a gentle hand over mine. I know you, they said. Stay with me and I will show you who you are. I pushed the Bulfinch and the almanacs together to cover the empty space where the book had been. Lightfooted and light of heart, I hurried to my brother’s side, The Truth of Mesmeric Influence a prize against my ribs.

      That night, I carried my lamp to my bedroom and unwound the book from the cocoon where I’d hidden it inside a woolen scarf in my bureau. Freed at my table, Mrs. Wolf described how Aaron in the Bible used hypnotism to turn a rod into a serpent. She hadn’t seen it herself, but she knew how it was done. A behavior of stillness and rest is effected by the transference of human energy, she wrote. So much knowledge accumulates every day that not a single book can hold the whole truth. In a month, in a year, what will the genuine practitioners learn and share with their dearest ones? The Mesmerist’s mystery exerts a force over his subject.

      When Leo followed my hand after his fever broke, he was able to do so because I had captivated him with my human energy. Mrs. Wolf described back to me what I could do and what she could do, and she called herself a Mesmerist.

      There was so much more to learn. Had I known everything she could do—that I could someday do, too—on the day that he watched my hand, I might have cured him right then.

       The whole body may be filled with a churning magnetism that reciprocates the gift of human energy.

      That swirling in me was why I had to poke holes in my poor ruined mattress. I was filled with magnetism that I had to release. Every time I worked a pin into the underside of a finger, I wouldn’t breathe—I couldn’t—until I’d broken the skin without raising blood. That tiny disturbance of sharp metal into dull flesh was a relief, a victory. Blood would have been a failure, proof that I was merely human, clumsy and made of shame. Magnetism stirred in me, seeking exit.

      At first, I had worked the pin into the pad of my finger, but I’d learned that moving it across the narrow column of fat at the place where the joint met the palm was better. This hurt less and left no tiny torn piece on the tip of my finger, a defect signaling weakness. The sight of that silver pin, so sharp and bright at the tip showing blurred and yellow-pink inside my own skin calmed what I had no name for until Mrs. Wolf named the feeling. Magnetism. Human energy.

      When I was done, I eased the pin out as intently as I’d put it in, watching that I didn’t break the skin but for the entry and exit points. I rendered the pin innocent by wiping the metal against my dress and returning the tool to the sewing box from where I’d taken it.

      No one knew this, of course. Not even Leo.

      One more day, I told myself. One more day and I’ll put Mrs. Wolf’s book back on the shelf. One more day before Daddy notices a gap in the height of his books, before he looks for a red cover that couldn’t belong to the father I knew. While I read, I slid the point of a glass-topped hairpin through a waxy callous at the base of my left ring finger. There was no need to watch.

      A WEEK PASSED. Even though we were well into autumn, the air hung summer-heavy. I sat by the kitchen door hoping for a breeze, peeling potatoes, tossing the skins into a bucket, and dropping the exposed white lumps into a bowl in my lap. The glare of hot weather had begun to hurt my eyes. Thunder in the distance meant relief.

      I knew I couldn’t captivate my cousin Dale. She never would look straight at me.

      Dale attended the same girls’ academy in Tennessee that our mothers had. They were sisters, and until they’d married, did everything together. Like them, Dale studied Shakespeare, Scripture, homemaking, and Latin. She sang in an unstable soprano that sounded like a bucket being pried from ice. And as often as possible, Momma invited СКАЧАТЬ