Matryoshka

When I first started dating Charlotte and she brought me back to her studio apartment, she told me there were worlds within worlds. I thought she was talking about the way one life could disappear into another and how even a space as small as her apartment might be its own world, hidden from the larger world, for as long as we slept together and breathed each other’s air, swapped spit, shared sweat.
I have to admit, though, when she showed me her tiny village, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. Call me old-fashioned, but a grown woman dedicating all that time to painting miniature storefronts and placing them next to the others, no two the same, not to mention the animatronics or what not involved in having little people move in between buildings. It was all crazy cat lady stuff—only without the cats, and I couldn’t tell if that made it better or worse. It’s the kind of stuff I could’ve tolerated if somebody like my weird cousin, Mike, who works at the video game store had done it. But a woman I meant to sleep with?
The little village ate up more space than her queen-sized bed.
“I call it Matryoshka.” She rested her chin on my shoulder, wrapped her arms around me. She explained that the mansion, the biggest building at one edge of the town was the first piece, a dollhouse she treasured as a girl, colored pink and white with brown trim.
“Matryoshka,” I repeated. “It sounds Russian.”
“Does it?”
Maybe Charlotte wasn’t going to be the kind of girl I’d bring home for Christmas—too bookish (I’d literally met her at a library book sale a girlfriend I was about to ditch dragged me to). Too weird with her dollhouse-mania. But we could have our fun in the meantime.
There’s some comfort in a relationship you know isn’t going anywhere. You don’t have to worry about what the girl is comfortable with. You want sex? You take it. You’re not in the mood? You tell her you’re starving and you’ve been craving some of that peach cobbler she makes so nice. Keeps her occupied in the kitchen for a couple hours, maybe more if she has to go out and buy one of the ingredients. Even the tiny village had its perks because it was good when a girl had a hobby to keep her entertained if I stole away on a date with someone new. That’s not to mention that when a girl has an esoteric interest like Charlotte’s, it makes gift-giving occasions a breeze. You should’ve seen how grateful she was when I furnished her with a miniature gas station that she made space for between a grocery store and library. Sure enough, she figured out how to light it up before long. When I was checking it out one evening, I saw the little people walking on the far side of one of the windows—just silhouettes on the far side of the metallic surfaces meant to resemble windows. I asked her how she did that, and I guess hardly anyone had asked her before, because she was so taken by my interest that she didn’t answer, just pounced on me, filling me up with her tongue, hands on the back of my head, then undoing my belt.
Things fell apart around Christmas.
I helped Charlotte decorate the apartment, which wasn’t much—mostly keeping her company while she strung lights in loops. She had a little fiber-optic tree that got warm enough at its base. I worried it was a fire hazard. But it was undeniably cozy to sip hot cocoa and Jack Daniels, listening to a Bing Crosby forty-five while Charlotte worked.
She asked for help hanging an adhesive hook on the ceiling. I set down the cocoa too fast, next to the tiny village, and the mug knocked over the hospital so it clattered to the floor, a door from the front entry flying loose, and in the scramble to pick it up, I wound up tipping over my mug and it spilled, flooding the cornfield that had rested in between a big barn and the hospital, and Charlotte screamed at me to stop!
Like I said, things fell apart. First the village, then she caught me in a lie about having to work late when really I was getting cocktails with Amber, the new secretary who wore skirts short enough that she was practically begging every guy in the office to make a pass. I guess Charlotte saw us, because when I went to her place afterward, she reamed me out about how I dared lie to her after destroying her hospital. I started to say something about how a grown woman shouldn’t be so consumed with her playthings, but stopped short. There’s no sense getting emotional with a girl. Better to leave things. I knew me and Charlotte weren’t long for this world.
I came back two nights later, thinking I’d probably end it, but I brought her a new little hospital—not a fancy miniature, but an actual toy this time, themed to go with some children’s show I’d never heard of. It’s not that I felt a need to get back in her good graces so much as I figured if I were going to leave her that night, better to leave her with something she could be excited about in the process. Even if the hospital would have memories of me attached to it, its presence might add some sweet to the bitter. Not that I was the asshole who’d cheated on, then left her, but that I might have been the one. The hospital was too big, out of proportion with the rest of the village, but she seemed to appreciate the gesture when she sat me down on the little stool she perched at to work on her village. She told me to look at the clocktower.
She instructed me to watch the second hand on the clock. To count its ticks on its way around, back to the twelve position. One, two, three. The clock itself was the size of a quarter, the hour and minute hands painted on, permanently fixed to say it was three o’clock. That the second hand moved probably did denote some engineering feat on her part. Nine, ten, eleven. Even as I was mildly impressed, I wondered if she couldn’t have yielded the same effect by removing the face of a watch and affixing it there, letting it tell the right time with all moving parts until its battery ran out. Seventeen, eighteen. I thought I might tell her the watch idea, maybe as another parting gift, though I’d have to be careful about how I worded it so as not to offend her—her craft. Thirty. I remembered my sister’s dollhouse, and how careful she was about arranging furniture. One time I’d rearranged it all, putting a toilet in the middle of the living room. Forty-two, forty-three. The oven in the master bedroom. I thought it might’ve driven her mad, thinking her dolls had rearranged their own furniture, but she’d known it was me right away and jammed the sharpest blade from my Swiss Army Knife into my bike’s front tire. Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty. I remembered learning to ride my bike, older than most kids I thought, six or seven. I was behind and embarrassed about it, so I nagged my father about it after work. He was an impatient man, but Mom reminded him about how he always said he wanted more time with his family. The two of us guilted him into it. Fifty-three. I remembered my father holding me after a bad fall, when my knee was scraped bloody. He’d told me I didn’t need the kneepads Mom had insisted I wear. It was the last time I remembered feeling him cradle my body. The last time I remembered feeling so small, because he was so big. Fifty-five, fifty-six. I was so small. Almost nothing at all. Fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty. When I looked back to Charlotte, she was enormous.
Rather, I was small. Tiny, even, and peering not down, but up to the clocktower. The hour and minute hands worked all right now. So high. A real tower.
It’s hard to say how one reconciles the absurd—to understand an entirely different state of being. Take a car accident. You think you’re going to work. The next thing you know, you’re making idle chatter with the jackass who bumped your car, waiting for police to take a report, and wondering if you’ll need a tow truck or if you can drive away.
I was in the tiny village, tinier yet myself, and soon talking with two other men—one of them tall, broad-shouldered, hair gelled in place, the other decidedly scruffy, in a plain white t-shirt and pajama pants, who smelled of okra. The two of them seemed like they wanted to comfort me, but also like they were excited by my presence. A new man in town.
“I’ve been here four years,” Okra announced. “I count it by Christmases.” It was clear the guy was proud of his ingenuity. He gestured his hand outward toward the night sky, which I realized wasn’t a night sky at all, but the inside of Charlotte’s apartment, infinitely vaster by scale, dimly lit as it was, the loops of multi-colored Christmas lights the size of stars from our perspective.
They shared little cups of whiskey with me, explaining Charlotte left airplane bottles of liquor with them at Christmastime.
There were others. Some I met that evening, some in the days to follow, the hint there were more who kept to themselves, hidden away in one of the miniature apartment buildings, where for all anyone knew, they’d hung or drank themselves to death. The lot of us, men who’d done wrong by Charlotte—fellow boyfriends and lovers, her supervisor from an office job who regretted cornering her after she’d filed a sexual harassment complaint.
We all had regrets, and I asked if there was any hope of escape, even in our tiny state. Okra said no, but Hair Gel corrected him that a man named Andy had made it out.
“We don’t know that,” Okra said.
“Andy wasn’t the type to off himself. He was too spirited, and he had a plan,” Hair Gel said. “The only part that doesn’t add up is that he didn’t take Josephine with him.”
“Who’s Josephine?” I asked.
These two brought me up to speed. Josephine was the only woman in the tiny village and no one knew how she’d crossed Charlotte to find herself in there, but the best most of the men could gather, she’d been in the village longer than anyone. She remembered a time before the village, when all there was was the big house—the mansion—where she lived.
***
When you’re the new guy—new in the office, the new boyfriend introduced to a group of loyal friends, new in town—it’s important to get the lay of the land. It’s better to risk looking shy or even disengaged than to come out and say the wrong thing.
Josephine was a queen to these men. By virtue of being the only woman and the longest-standing denizen of the village there was a certain deference to her, a certain wonder from afar. Most of these guys were infatuated, acted like school boys, gossiping about a pretty girl.
I got to know Josephine.
I came bearing a gift on my first visit, picking up a roasted turkey from the unstaffed grocery store. She let me in, a little annoyed at the interruption, I could tell. She reminded me of Charlotte for her red-brown hair, thick with curls. She made an excited burst of sound when I got her to laugh. She kissed the same, too. Like she was starving.
I learned Josephine was Charlotte’s sister. I came to understand, too—from how rarely she left her house, from the way she kept her shutters drawn, from the way she buried herself for whole afternoons in the pages of Russian classics like Anna Karenina and The Brothers Karamazov—that unlike us men whom Charlotte had imprisoned in her tiny village, Josephine was here by choice.
I’d earned a degree of trust, if only by knowing when to stay quiet, when to leave her alone—for days, even, sometimes—by the time I asked her how long she’d lived in Matryoshka?
She answered, honestly, that she couldn’t know. She asked me what year it was, and looked with a sort of wonder when I told her.
You gather insights, if you’re attentive. I hadn’t been there long enough to have a sense of it first-hand, but I gathered over time—including a session of the two of us comparing and laughing at one another’s driver’s license photos—that Josephine hadn’t aged a day since she’d been in the tiny village. I gathered it had been, conservatively, twenty years, based on how long ago her license expired.
And though I maintained an instinct toward escaping, I also recognized some advantages of living in Matryoshka. Never aging. I didn’t even stink, despite not having any water to bathe in, despite never changing my clothes. I didn’t hunger either, forgetting to eat for at least one full day. Eating, drinking was a luxury, not a necessity in this place. I didn’t have to go to work. Combine these factors with Josephine being as good as—or maybe better—lover than her sister, and add a lack of mortal dread, because I might stay in this place forever unchanged, and it didn’t all seem so bad.
There was the matter of the other men in town, though. They’d been warm to me up front, willingly sharing their liquor. But after I started spending the night at the mansion, the same men crowded me with questions. Then they stopped saying hello or cleared off the street altogether when I passed.
I grew lonely. Maybe a little restless. That familiar sensation of too much time spent with one person. Josephine wasn’t possessive, to her credit. Maybe because she didn’t need to be, not another woman around, nothing but time for me to come back to her even if I wandered all day.
I visited the hospital, walking a road stained from the cocoa I’d spilled. When I walked through the hospital doors, I found the building was not only larger, but much cheaper than the rest of what Charlotte had assembled. Truly a toy, like walking through a cartoon of boxy hospital beds, the IV bags not full of fluid but rather puffed up with air, like shipping materials.
I didn’t expect to stay long. There was no point in lingering anywhere, just as there was no point in rushing when time stretched infinitely across such a finite space. Anyplace I liked, I might return to. Anyplace I didn’t would become a distant memory after enough days. There was some novelty to the unrefined, oversized hospital and knowing I’d brought it to Matryoshka. Maybe that was how benefactors felt when they walked through buildings they’d paid for.
I didn’t expect to find anyone, but there he was. He was the first person in Matryoshka I’d come across who looked dirty, who had the unmistakable smell of someone who was homeless. It occurred to me, only then, that I hadn’t felt the sensation of an itch since arriving in the tiny village but this man scratched at his mess of sandy brown hair with a fury, hard enough I could feel his itch, too.
I backed away, but he called out, “Come here, stranger. I can smell you.”
I might have left him behind, but Matryoshka was nothing if not small, and if I left this man now, I’d only come up on him later. Besides, I’d found advantages to unlikely friends—castoffs with odd gifts, a disproportionate sense of loyalty.
So, I sat with him. He went by the name Bones. Blind as a bat, and I soon discovered his hearing wasn’t too good either. He credited Charlotte with saving his life.
“I’m at the end of my luck,” Bones said. “Hadn’t had a roof over my head for years—that was nothing new, but I had some bad people coming after me and I hadn’t had a bite for two days, when she invited me up to her apartment.”
I’d never known Charlotte to take in strays, private as she could be, protective over her space. But she had a kindness to her, too. Just as I might seek out a friend who was down on his luck for strategic purposes, she might do so out of the goodness of her heart, like the way she’d give expensive restaurant leftovers to a beggar on the street if she didn’t have any change. That used to piss me off.
But Bones was her masterpiece of kindness and tiny village magic. Not an ex-boyfriend, but a man she was uniquely suited to help. Who better to make disappear from the world? Who would better appreciate a life in which he was safe and warm and didn’t ever need to worry about food again?
So it wasn’t just Josephine here by choice; or maybe not choice per se, but because it was genuinely what was best. Maybe there were more people hidden away like them. After all, wouldn’t the best folks of Napolene want to hide themselves away from us bastards who’d wronged Charlotte, whom she’d sentenced to this detention?
Bones offered me new insight into Andy, too—the man Okra and Hair Gel had told me about who’d disappeared. Bones said Andy was still in Josephine’s house.
“No telling if he wants to be or not,” Bones said. “I always thought there was something fishy about him. The way he cozied up to Josephine like he did, the way he hid out with her, made a little life with her straight away, didn’t get to know the rest of the town.”
I couldn’t quite tell if Bones were saying something about me. Who else did he talk to? What had he heard?
“Maybe she’s keeping him there or maybe he’s hiding.” Bones shrugged. “I think she killed him.”
***
Long before my confinement to Matryoshka, I learned the importance of never letting anyone in my head. Most people have an agenda, whether they know it or not. That included Bones.
It might’ve included Josephine, too.
I poked around the house, exploring the rooms I hadn’t ventured into yet, noting which doors were locked and strategizing how I might ask Josephine to open them. I’d have to space it out. Make her suspicious, and the game would be up before it got started.
I asked what was behind the first door I couldn’t get into. My first mistake. Maybe there was a corpse behind that door. Or maybe Andy was quietly living there. Maybe someone else. After all, I hadn’t met anyone who’d been in Matryoshka nearly as long as Josephine. Maybe there’d been a dozen men before Andy and they were all somewhere in this house.
She turned a shade paler. “Why are you asking?” Even though that was the simplest question in the world, I should’ve had an answer ready, I stumbled.
I tripped over my words. I was talking too fast. Something about that look on her face really threw me for a loop. By the time I’d steadied and said I was only curious, I felt certain she’d throw me out.
She didn’t, though.
Josephine held my hand, took the key from some unseen pocket in the folds of her dress, and unlocked the door. And there, inside, I saw a tiny village.
It was sensational. Larger than her sister’s. Less a village than a town, maybe an entire county, with all of the staples—the school, the hospital, the town hall, the village square, the shops, the houses. Josephine had a baseball stadium, too, and a long stretch of road when the houses grew more sparse, before the farmland, marked with big red barns, a grain silo, and a field. Maybe it was Charlotte’s handiwork or maybe it was the experience of living in Matryoshka, but I couldn’t help feeling impressed, at the hours, days, years, Josephine must have invested in this little world.
“This is my favorite part.” She took my chin between her thumb and forefinger, guiding me back to the center. A playground with a jungle gym, teeter totter, and slide. A bakery. A library. A clock tower. “Watch the second hand. Count it as it goes around.”
I counted. One, two, three, four. For all my fumbling, I’d done something right, to be let into Josephine’s secret space. For her to let me see her work. Twelve, thirteen. Maybe that was the whole point of Matryoshka, what men like Okra and Hair Gel never understood. The tiny village was no prison, but a place to recreate oneself. To be one’s best self. Forty, forty-one. I’d be better, too. No need to escape—no time soon, anyway. Wouldn’t it be something to emerge years, maybe decades later, the same age, interest accruing in my bank accounts, technology advancing, a new world awaiting me. Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine. There were worlds within worlds, Charlotte had once told me. I understood then. A moment of clarity. I could see what was happening so clearly.