Abnormal Excitement by Jake Wolff

    At the eastern peninsula, there was, if anything, the expectation of nature’s beauty. What lingered here was not the breathtaking shimmer of a sun setting into water or the damp frown of a rainbow after rain, but the sense that these things were bound to Camp Meenahga in the same way that daughters were bound to their mothers. To appreciate the aesthetics of the peninsula had little to do with what was seen or what was there; it sprung instead from some obligation, a sort of filial duty to let the little beauties justify and account for the world’s larger ugliness. Rebecca closed her leather-bound personality log and compared in her mind the difference between how she felt and how she was supposed to feel. She turned toward the lodge. It was a filial duty, yes, but simply feminine, above all things.

    She allowed her toes to hit the wet moss of the rock-stairs as she made her way toward the grounds. The camp had been founded almost a decade ago by two widows with a great deal of time and money. It was a place, they said, where girls became women—or at least, less like girls. But Rebecca had seen her mother, globe-like and glowing, in the months before her baby brother was born, and had formed her own ideas about what made a girl into a woman. None of it had anything to do with camping.

    It was a strict routine. In the mornings, they learned classics and drama. They read Shakespeare and Homer out loud—as though one spoke naturally to the other—until the instructor tapped the desk with her baton and reminded them that perfect sound came as much from the stomach as from the throat and tongue. In the afternoons, it was outdoor activity, mostly horseback riding and swimming, but occasionally more competitive games, like croquette.

    Some days, they merely walked the trails, their chaperones naming the fauna and wildlife until their prettiness became a unified whole solely through the repetition. The trillium red squirrel, the dwarf juniper fox snake, the fabled lady-slipper black-capped chickadee. They were no longer flower and avis, shrub and reptile, but simply a single thing of nature, a thing that was, and was nicely.

    The girls slept two to a tent, arranged in a circle with a central fire to ward off coyotes. But before bed were personality lessons—the etiquette of feeling—to warn them against the dangers of intense, unchecked emotion. It was normal to be sad; it was abnormal to be very sad. Feel, but do not feel strongly. The class was based almost entirely on the elimination of adverbs.     

    At the door to the lodge, Rebecca was met by Ms. Debacker, the personality instructor. Ms. Debacker stood a rigid five feet eleven, but could increase this number to at least seven feet when her authority was challenged. A dark-haired, native Prussian, she was born, the girls guessed, in the early 1880s. She spoke of her hometown, Konigsberg, as a place where “Girls were like horses to the men! My father put blinders on my mother, when she not behave!” As a young girl, she was stung by a jellyfish in the Baltic Sea, a gelatinous offense that completely destroyed one kidney and left the other at half speed. When one of the girls gave a wrong answer in class, she clutched this kidney as though the incorrect response was in her bloodstream, overpowering the filtering mechanism of her electrified renals.

    “So, Ms. Rebecca,” she said, “we have class in twenty minutes, yes?”

    “Yes, Ms. Debacker.”

    “I see you writing in your log. This is good. Things are well for you?”

    “Things…are fine, thank you.”

    “I see. You are still feeling this place is maybe no good, yes?”

    “No, no. Not that. I enjoy my classes and I like all the girls very much. I just don’t seem to like it here as much as everyone else. I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t like the woods.”

    Ms. Debacker chuckled. “You know, in park, many campers, even the men, mistake fox snake for rattler. They run screaming, help me, help me, thinking they are sure to be bit or eaten.” Ms. Debacker paused and her left hand hovered slightly over her kidney. Somewhere, deep in her mind, she saw the jellyfish drifting toward her thigh, too late, too late to swim against the roll of the wave. “Then we say, is just fox snake! No poison. A bite less dangerous than a hound. We say, sometimes what we think is troubling us is not what we think.”

    She put a hand on Rebecca’s shoulder and pushed herself off toward the tents. Rebecca watched her go and held her fingers to her lips, stifling a giggle—Ms. Debacker’s metaphor was absurd.

                                                    ****

    Dennis used a small, hand-held camping shovel to dig up his box of pornography. It was a scandalous act, but the scandal was tucked away behind dual layers of impotence and self-awareness. At 14, he was too old to be this ashamed of the secret, and he knew it. Other boys his age hid their stash under a thin pile of comic books, or even right under their mattresses, practically daring their mothers to find it. He understood the impulse—this desire to be discovered. Nothing a child does is normal or abnormal until confirmed as one or the other by a parent (preferably two). But Dennis knew he wasn’t normal, and needed no further proof from his parents or his peers.

    So there he was, secreting away on the back acre of his family’s estate, covered by a canopy of pine and white cedar. He entered the combination and lifted the latch. Confronted with the treasure, he felt a renewed sense of inadequacy. It was hardly even pornography. The girls were all clothed, and if they had lost their bras, they covered the mysteries beneath with their hands, the fingers not even parted. Most of his collection he salvaged from men’s magazines his father threw away, tipping over the trashcan at night like a pubescent raccoon. That was it: about 30 pictures from magazines his father really did read for the articles.

    The treasure chest itself was a gutted tackle box from the depths of the basement. Worried about corrosion, he had layered the inside with gold-alloy cement stolen from his father’s dental office. If true scandal was to be found anywhere in that box, it was in this protective amalgam—about $5,000 worth of cavity fillings.

    Dennis turned to sit with his back against the tree and winced. That day at school, Adam Turnbow dared him to jump from the Reading Loft onto a beanbag chair what seemed like four or five hundred feet below. Dennis, eager to prove his coolness—he scolded himself for this even at the time—jumped, boldly pushing off in an upward arc to increase the distance. His aim was true, but he had failed to notice Adam and his cool-kid friends stuffing their backpacks and lunchboxes beneath the beanbag.

    He believed he may have cracked his tailbone, but was too embarrassed to tell the teacher or his parents. Worse yet, Adam mocked him for the rest of the day—in a moment of foolish weakness, Dennis allowed tears to blink under his eyelids, after he landed.

    He took a deep breath and exhaled the memory. Focusing his eyes on the pictures, he unzipped his pants and tried to think of anything but humiliation. But these pictures were humiliation. Surely, even the other nerds in his class had real pornography, with actual nudity and women in uncomfortable, aerobic positions. His women looked bored, lazily smiling toward the camera, their thoughts somewhere else. What he needed was to start fresh.

    One by one, he tore the pictures into small, untraceable bits. Jennifer Garner had her head ripped off, her dimples and eyes floating in the air like erotic confetti. Carmen Electra lost her legs, and then her body looked almost mantis-like, with her spine arched back and her elbows jutting out from the sides. Cindy Crawford practically exploded in his hands. This was it. The start of a new Dennis.

    But when he came to the last picture, he froze. Something about leaving the box empty seemed too extreme. He was refinancing; there was no need to declare bankruptcy. Perhaps he should leave this one and build from there. The picture quivered in his hand.

    He surveyed the image before placing it back in the box. It showed Paris Hilton, short haired and blond, reclining on what seemed to be a plastic pool chair. Her pink robe was open at the waist, revealing the blue bikini beneath. Her legs were paper thin, doll-like, but sexy somehow because they suggested movement, muscle. Red lips pursed under large eyes and a classic nose. A long neck. Her computer-smoothed skin seemed to glisten and tan, right before him. Dennis nodded. She was worth keeping.

    He closed the lid and placed the box back into its shallow grave. He thought of the time capsule they made in school—filled with news clippings and pictures and letters from the students— and wondered how a box like this would be received in the future. What would they think of him? Would they picture him as he was: awkward and painfully confused about sex, pleasuring himself by the cold of the lake while his parents were sleeping? He wondered then if he could reverse the process and send the box back in time, a sort of past capsule, to be dug up by the people who lived where he lived, long before he lived there. This idea attracted him; it seemed a more important sort of connection. He wondered too what they would think of Paris Hilton in the olden days. Once, while watching Entertainment Tonight, his mother said, “The only reason that Paris girl is so popular is because she makes it okay for people to act like misogynists.” He only half understood.

    Dennis picked up the shovel. He paused. In a weird, childish moment, he leaned close to the box and entered a number into the combination lock before he buried it again. The chill from the lake was terribly present. As Dennis scooped a shallow layer of dirt and dust onto his one-piece collection of scavenged pornography, the combination registered 1925.

 ****

    The girls gathered around the popping heat of the fire, their fingers going tingly numb from the combination of hot and cold air. Rebecca sat next to her tent-mate, Candace, who at 16 was the oldest girl in camp. It was just Rebecca’s luck to be paired with the one girl who would most look down upon her childish mood swings. Candace gingerly poked the fire, and sighed.

    “It really is so beautiful here. I wish I could stay forever.”

    Rebecca turned, her eyes skeptical. “Do you really think so? Or are you just saying that because it’s what people are supposed to say when camping?”

    “I can’t imagine,” Candace said. “I can’t imagine what you mean.”

    “Never mind,” said Rebecca. There was no need to force the issue. Her personality lesson had gone poorly enough already. She tried to write her personality log as a normal girl would—“Today, I saw a dragonfly shed its skin, and felt renewed myself!”—but it seemed at times like her loneliness was truly overwhelming her, and the residue of this feeling filled the cracks of her slanted penmanship. Ms. Debacker saw right through it.

    “Rebecca, you are very smart girl and this is good for you. But sometimes you are thinking too much. It is good to relax, enjoy your friends. What husband wants a wife who is dark, dark all the time?”

    Rebecca blinked smoke from her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate how lovely everything was at Camp Meenahga, it was just…her teachers and peers seemed to leap from this point to a place of larger meaning, and Rebecca was stuck back at the point of progression. Around the circle, girls were giggling and brushing each other’s hair. Rebecca lowered her eyes and dug her toe under the soft dirt.

    The only times she enjoyed these late-night gatherings were when Dr. Fenton, the camp physician, would come to tell ghost stories. He had this way of speaking as though they weren’t stories at all, but memories, things he was reliving deep in his heart as he told them. It was a look in his eye, a quick move of his fingers through his too-thick beard. It was the little things he did.

    Her favorite involved a young girl, Angelica Owen, who came to Camp Meenahga the very first year. Angelica had no friends. None of the other girls even knew her name or where she was from. Every night, she would sneak off by herself to sit by the water and listen to the nocturnal sounds of animals still awake. One night, as she was leaving, her foot became stuck in a thicket of bushes and roots, and the more she struggled, the tighter she was bound. Because no one knew her or thought of her at all, it was two full days before the instructors noticed she was missing. When they finally tried to find her, all they discovered was her shoe, still wedged in the thicket. Angelica was never seen again. Dr. Fenton explained that sometimes, her ghost wandered the shores of the peninsula, asking if anyone had seen her missing shoe.

    “Call her by her name,” he said, “if you see her.”

    Rebecca smiled, rose from her seat, and tiptoed away as if heading toward her tent. Instead, she arced left, toward the peninsula.

 ****

    Dr. Fenton lowered his reading glasses and tapped a rhythm of boredom on his desk. He was 39 years old, single, and a terrible, horrible man.

    When the widows posted a sign at the town hall for a camp physician, Dr. Fenton had just returned home from a trip to London. In truth, he fled home, bankrupted by gambling debts. His creditors nearly caught him at the docks, but instead watched his ship depart, their fists raised comically in the air as he drifted into the foggy British horizon. Back in America, he was safe, but had nothing.

    So he visited the widows, told a lie, stayed for dinner, and was hired by the end of the night. Almost two years later, and here he was, reading alone under the light of his lantern and the shadow of his guilt. He was a doctor, that was true, just not as the widows believed.

    Dr. Fenton was a dentist. His knowledge of the body below the neck—especially the female body—was no greater than an average man of learning. The fear of his own ignorance haunted him. Every day he prayed for healthy, healthy girls.

    To compensate for his guilt, Dr. Fenton paid an almost obsessive attention to the girls’ teeth. No canine went unbrushed. No gums went unprodded. No molar was allowed to even hint at disease. He could safely say that these girls had the healthiest dentition in the state of Wisconsin.   

    If there was any clear drawback to this fixation, it was that some girls were starting to see the tooth as the center all of things related to health and sickness. Why else was he always craning back their necks to peer desperately through their yawning mouths? Just yesterday, Deloris Brown, her face a crimson red, asked if being tongue-kissed by a boy left a visible mark on the teeth or gums, like a footprint in the sand.

    He had to resign. He had to.

    Just then, there was a knock on his door—frantic, insistent. As always, he felt the acidic twist of anxiety in his stomach. What if he didn’t know what to do? What if there was bleeding? Still, he opened the door. One of the camp girls, Rebecca, ducked into the room, something clutched against her chest.

    “Dr. Fenton please don’t tell, but I found this!” She held a box out to him. He eyed her excited, frightened expression. Rebecca was out of place here; he’d seen it from the start. Her straight brown hair and cautious, doubtful eyes marked her immediately as a girl more suited to New England. Her teeth were nearly perfect.

    “What? Rebecca, what is this?” He took the box simply because it was out there, resting in her arms like a word spoken—like something that could not be taken back. He placed it on his desk. It was metal, clearly, with a strange lock looped around the latch. A curved metal. A set of numbers.

    “I found this, just now, at the peninsula.” Rebecca was entirely out of breath. Her mouth hung open like a much younger child. “It won’t open, I thought—“

    “Where at the peninsula?” Dr. Fenton was on his knees, his eyes right up to the numbers: 1925. That was the correct year. He placed a finger against the 9, and it moved, just slightly.

    “I was walking along the shore and saw a pinecone, sitting perfectly upright beneath a tree. I went to look, and found this buried underneath.”

    Dr. Fenton stood up. “You shouldn’t have been alone at the peninsula this late.” What else was he to say?

    “I thought…” Rebecca nodded toward his tools, “I’ve seen you use your tools to break things. I thought you could open it for me.  And not tell.”

    “Well, hmm. It is a curious vessel.” He took the box to his workbench and removed his hammer from the wall. He had never seen these moving numbers before, but a lock was a lock, and this seemed less sturdy than the rest, if anything. “Cover your ears, dear.”

    He brought the hammer down seven times until the lock twisted and snapped. Rebecca was at his side before his hands had even stopped ringing. He flipped the latch and opened the lid. There was hardly a creak.

    “Oh my,” he said. Inside the box was a single, shimmering piece of erotica.

    “I knew it!” Rebecca yelled, grabbing the paper from the box.

    “What? Come now. You can’t have that, it’s not prop—” Dr. Fenton paused. It was a photograph, or like a photograph, but not as he had ever seen. It was so real as to be nearly alive, and yet it was colored, so deeply and beautifully colored, that he was sure it was a painting.

    “What is this paper?” Rebecca said. “It feels like glass. Soft glass.” She looked to him, and he shook his head, bewildered. They studied the image together. The girl was reclining, her legs spread suggestively, in undergarments so small as to be nearly invisible. She wore a robe, soft and expensive looking, but someone had forced her to leave it open. Her face was lovely, even sweet, in its own, unfamiliar way. Dr. Fenton blinked. The image was so beautiful that he could hardly breathe. The pornography of it seemed almost accidental, as if someone stamped the immodesty into the fiber of the page long after it was made. Yes, that was it. It looked like an image whose original purpose had been perverted. 

    “It’s her, isn’t it?” Rebecca said. Dr. Fenton frowned, confused. Rebecca smiled. “It’s Angelica,” she said.

    “Oh, come now, that’s just a —”

    “Dr. Fenton! Dr. Fenton!” It was Ms. Debacker, rumbling from the lodge. “What is this noise!”

    Rebecca’s eyes went wide. “Thank you!” she said, giving his arm a quick hug. Then she was out the door, picture in hand.

    Dr. Fenton stood still for a moment, scratching his beard. Outside, the giant Prussian was huffing her way closer. He slipped his reading glasses toward the top of his nose and leaned forward to examine the inside of the box. Some sort of coating had been applied to the inner surfaces. He ran his index finger along the bottom, and then rubbed it against his thumb.

    “What in the hell is this?” he said.

****

    A small group of girls gathered at the peninsula. Rebecca held the picture out for them as they circled around her, their shocked faces giving her intense satisfaction. Candace reached for the paper, but then drew back.

    “Do you think it’s really her?” she said.

    “It has to be. It’s a sign.”  Rebecca’s hands were shaking—from the cold, the excitement, and the attention. She admired the picture again. She knew it was Angelica; the overwhelming newness of the image proved that it was not from this world. But there were still so many questions to be answered. She feared the girl’s nudity was a sign of something evil, but it didn’t seem evil, just lovely and strange—and meaningful.    

    “Well I don’t like it,” said one of the girls. “It’s vulgar.”

    Rebecca glared at her. “You shush, Annie. I think she’s beautiful, and wherever she is looks splendid. Maybe everyone is nude there. Maybe where she is, all girls dress that way. She just wanted us to see how she was doing, but we don’t need you to see.”

    Annie raised her eyebrows. “You are not normal.” She stormed off, back toward the fire. The other girls watched her go, hesitated, but did not move. Rebecca smiled; she had won the fight.

    “Maybe…maybe she got tired of being a ghost,” Candace said. “She must have been cold, walking at night. Especially with only one shoe.”

    “You could be right,” Rebecca said, running her finger along the shape of the girl. It was then she realized why this picture could not be sinister: Angelica was not smiling. That’s how she knew. If Angelica was being forced, they would have made her smile, made her pose. But she was just being there, lying down, feeling neither happy nor sad. Her robe was open simply because it was. Whatever happened to her that night, alone at the lake with her foot caught in the thicket, she had either survived or not survived, and still she was eager to be seen.

    Rebecca looked at the other girls, all in their own places. They were staring at the picture. Their eyes were bright. All these excess emotions, and with no sense of which were normal and which were not, the only thing they could think to do, that any of them could think to do, was stay close to each other, all in their own places. It seemed they’d never held this still for so long, and as they stood bunched together in their white middy blouses, they appeared to Rebecca like a small bouquet of wild lilies—she wanted to gather them, hold them, breathe them in.

    “Oh no! Oh no! What is this?” A hand came from above her like a dropped anchor, snatching at the picture and pulling it away. Rebecca shrieked. Ms. Debacker held the picture close to her face. “Terrible! Terrible!” she said. She began to head back toward the tents. Rebecca followed, the other girls close behind.

    “It’s mine, it’s mine!” she said, but Ms. Debacker would not respond. She was mumbling to herself about inappropriate girls and impending punishments. At the tents, she did not stop, and it was then that Rebecca saw her true purpose. She moaned, flailing at her instructor.

    They came to the fire. In the flickering light of the flames, while the logs blackened and split, Ms. Debacker paused, for the briefest moment, to clutch at her kidney. Defeat was postponed in this agonizing second as the sticky arms of the jellyfish reminded her that once she was a girl herself, a girl subject to large and unforgiving forces. But then she was straight-backed, seven feet tall, and with a final judgment—“Terrible!”—she cast the picture into the fire. Rebecca let out a sob and held her hands over her face. Her shoulders shook. The other girls scattered, frightened of the consequences to come. Ms. Debacker turned from the fire.

    “Now, Rebecca, we are going to have a talk!”

    But Rebecca was already gone, running as fast as she could to Dr. Fenton. She was going to need that box.

                                                    ****

    The first time a child stays awake while his parents are sleeping, it is perhaps the genesis of that one thought—a slow, creeping thought—that parents are nothing greater than their children, and if anything, will soon be less. Dennis snuck out the back door and jumped from the patio stairs into the yard. These dark nights used to scare him, but now he felt safe. He wasn’t any older or braver; he was simply more prepared. Dennis turned on his flashlight.

He followed the same markers he used each night. Stay straight at the cream-marble birdbath; turn slight left at the twin cedars; jump the ant log by the second-biggest boulder. Dennis smiled. A secret performed once is still a secret, even from its creator, but a secret lived to the dull edge of routine belongs to its maker, in a way that few things ever belong to anyone. The pine was just ahead.

    He stopped. Something was not right. The flashlight scanned the ground beneath the tree as Dennis knelt where he always knelt. The pinecone was gone, and the dirt looked packed, tightly packed, much more so than he left it. He experienced a distinct shiver of fear, a fear that was new to him and stayed in his chest, made residence. He looked into the surrounding shadows. He put the flashlight down and readied the shovel. You were upset that night, he thought to himself. Maybe you forgot the pinecone. Maybe you dug deeper.     

    The shovel made a sound like footsteps as he drove it into the dirt, kicking up small rocks and insects. Then there was the seismic clank of metal on metal, and he paused. The box was there. He reached in, scraping away the last layer of dirt and lifting the box from the hole. It was deeper, much deeper than he ever dug. He put the box on the ground, and as he turned it to face him, his heart dropped. The lock was destroyed. The box had been opened.

    He lifted the lid with shaking hands. The picture was gone, and in its place was an envelope—a faded, ancient gray. It was sealed with wax, red once, but crusted now, bruised and old. Dennis looked behind him and considered leaving. But the letter wasn’t open, and would never be, if he left. He took it from the box and broke the seal. A single sheet of unlined paper slipped into his hands. A note was there, in black ink and smudged slightly, but written in a lovely script:

Dear Angelica, Dear Stranger,

        I cannot know if I am writing to Angelica herself or simply to the owner of the photograph and box. I can tell you that I found them both, as I know you must have wanted. Sadly, I do not have long to write.

        I want to thank you for sending me such a strange and wonderful gift. I cannot begin to understand its purpose, but I promise you that I will never forget Angelica, her picture, or the box. I hope that means something to you, whoever and wherever you are.

        I am content to never know more of you, but I do have one hope. If I am thinking of you, and the picture, then perhaps you can think of me, and this letter. Truly, I am

Sincerely grateful,

    Dennis released a small sigh. He blinked, then blinked again. He felt his lower lip begin to tremble, and he bit down, tucking it under his teeth like an injured wing. The flashlight was at his feet, and its beam cast out into the darkness, revealing nothing. Somewhere in the low shrubs, a woodcock cried peent peent like a little frog. 

    He held the letter in one hand and the lock in the other, as if weighing them. The lock was smashed, twisted, and it had grown rusty—the long, curved shackle was now a deep, darkened red, the color of muddy clay. A slow certainty built within him, and he knew without really knowing that whatever magic was contained in that lock was gone now, its power spent like a secret revealed. He hefted it in his hands, ran his thumb over the warped numbers. He raised his arm high and threw the lock deep into the woods, watching as it arched out of sight into the small hours of blackness.

    “Rebecca,” he said.       

    He picked up the flashlight and pointed it toward home. Behind him, the box was out, uncovered. He wouldn’t bury it again. He realized he’d been protecting his emotion the way his mother protected the china closet—by letting no one near it.  

    Dennis slid the letter into his pocket, patted it against his leg. He took one final look back, at the box, at the shovel, at the darkness where the lock would be. And then he ran quickly for home.

                                                   ****

    Rebecca sat on the damp sand of the shoreline, her feet covered and uncovered by the small waves of the lake. Ms. Debacker would come for her soon. She was still mad about the picture, but nothing bad would happen. Tomorrow was horseback riding—the next day, croquette. Rebecca didn’t mind the sameness. She felt a change in herself, a faint, inner difference that seemed to suggest she would one day be more connected to the people around her. She would grow into them. She would grow into them the way a child grows into a new pair of shoes.    

    She sat up, tilted her head. An unexpected feeling rolled in from off the water; she felt it breaking over the bare skin of her arms and face. She knew immediately what it was. This feeling was unmistakable. It was that warm chill you sometimes get—that splash of uncertainty and hope, that quickening of the heart—when someone calls your name.  

	About the Author: Jake Wolff is an MFA candidate in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His fiction is upcoming in Redivider and Sou'Wester, and his poetry recently appeared in Blood & Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine.

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