by Rory Power
I am not either
* * *
—
A soft wash
Waves
The beach at Raxter at the Raxter before the Tox
I’m alone but the kind of alone where you aren’t where you can feel the other girls behind you running laughing chattering and it’s okay that you’re by yourself on the beach because all you have to do is turn around and there they’ll be
But I don’t turn around
In the water there’s a crab still and bright and I bend down so my knees break the surface no canvas and denim just the plaid skirt all soft like I never stopped wearing it
The crab looks at me
I look at the crab
It floats up floats out of the water and lands in my hands and it’s dry
I’m dreaming I’m not really there and I know it but I hold the crab up and I look in close at the gleam of the shell and there I am reflected in tiny pieces
a hundred little versions of me
and they say “welcome home” and then
The crab twitching and its claws turning black slowly
Slowly and then the whole shell until the body black the legs black my hands black my arms black
I try to let go but I can’t and around me the water black the shore black and if I let go I will disappear
If I lose this I will disappear
I know it the way you know things in your dreams
everything black everything everything and oh
Awake
* * *
—
It’s quiet at first. My head finally clear, the ward empty. Nobody is coming. Maybe they have what they need, or maybe they know they will never get it.
“Hey.”
I try to lift my head, and there’s Teddy, propped up in bed. Skin dull and drained, but smiling, wearing a pair of scrubs so white it hurts to look at him.
“They tried another cure,” he says. “A virus that might kill whatever you have, but your body fought it off.”
I’m staring at the ceiling again when he says, “Whatever we have. I mean, whatever we have.”
After a while he gets up. Crosses to my side of the room and undoes my restraints. No need for them now. We both know that.
“Okay?” he asks.
I nod. Open my mouth and tap my throat.
“Hang on.” He finds the whiteboard in the cabinet. Gets in bed alongside me, helps me wrap my fingers around the marker, and we ask questions we will never have time for.
What’s your last name
“What?”
You know mine
“It’s Martin.”
You know what they say about men with two first names
“No.”
Me neither
* * *
—
It takes about an hour, I think, for the signs to come back. And when they do they turn him sweaty and make him shake. They draw dark lines under his eyes and they empty him out.
What hurts
He groans. Rolls up onto his hands and knees and vomits over the side of the gurney. Black liquid, something grainy to the texture. I put my hand on his shoulder.
“I’m fine.”
But he isn’t, and he never will be, and I reach under the gurney, press the call button with shaking fingers.
“It’s no use,” he says. “They won’t come.”
I don’t ask how he knows.
* * *
—
It gets worse. He goes limp like his bones aren’t in him anymore, like Gaby from the youngest year who never survived her first.
I kneel, help him take my spot propped up against the pillows. When I lay my hand across his forehead he pulls away.
I didn’t think it would happen to you
He shuts his eyes and leans his head back. The skin of his throat is new and young, soft when I press my fingertips to the crest of his collarbones.
“Sure,” he says, and it’s the last thing for a long while.
* * *
—
I write them while he’s sleeping. Over and over across the whiteboard.
I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry
When he wakes up I show him, and I take his hand, press his palm over my heart. Beat and beat and at last he relents, and shuts his eyes, and slumps against me.
What I meant, what I wanted. They don’t matter anymore. We’re here, and that’s the rest of our lives.
* * *
—
The second flare-up ties him in knots, and when it’s over I can’t touch him without feeling a static shock. He is crying. I feel like crying, too, but I know it would turn into a ragged kind of laughter.
I can see faces in the windows. Sometimes Paretta, sometimes a nurse whose face seems familiar, even behind her mask. They are watching. Waiting for it to end.
“Tell me something,” Teddy says, the last of it wringing him out.
What
“Anything.”
I think back to the day I met him. The questions he asked. I write down the price of milk. He tries to laugh.
“Something else,” he says.
* * *
—
By the time the third flare-up comes, I have torn the bottom of my hospital gown to bits and used it to wipe bile from the corners of his mouth.
Someone is in the window and Teddy is lying down and I am next to him and my hand is cramping as I write out a joke I heard my father tell once. I notice his finger first. The index finger. A twitch, a pulling so small you wouldn’t see it if you hadn’t spent almost a year and a half on a roof looking for it. But I did.
It makes me scramble away and I wish it didn’t, but I huddle at the far end of my bed, try not to make any noise. I remember how it can go. I remember what it makes you do when it doesn’t want your body anymore.
His eyes flick open, glassy and bright. Beautiful, and for a moment he’s just Teddy. Just a boy, but then he speaks.
“Hello,” he says. Empty. No recognition waiting underneath.
He’s trying to get up, trying to crawl his way over to me, and if he does, he will hurt me without meaning to. I am worried I will let him.
* * *
—
It is the strips from my hospital gown that do it.
They are long, and he knots them together, makes them longer. Smiling. His mouth open, something starting to move behind his teeth. Shadowed, delicate, and there—there—a vine crawling out from inside him to curl around his lip. Like the kind that slink across the fence at Raxter. Like the kind that drape from tree to tree.
His hands tying a rope like they aren’t his anymore. And more vines, another and another, branching and winding in a black tangle, blood leaking from his mouth, from his ears. Reaching for me, like they’re looking for a new home. I start to know what the rope is for. But I don’t do anything. I sit so my legs are tucked under me. I watch the Tox go to work.
On his knees. A rope into a noose.
His eyes never close. His grip never changes. He is pulling right until the end.
CHAPTER 16
There is not enough difference between the white of the wall and the white of the floor. I am having trouble keeping them what they are.
There is a stain on what I think is the floor and it is a little ways away from my foot. I am watching the edges of it come and go.
There is a sound in the room. I am having trouble telling what it is.
* * *
—
This is with my eyes closed.
A cut on my left ankle, about as long as my thumb. A bruise rotting down from my right kneecap. Nothing on my thighs, only a tenseness inside them.
At my hips three indents in the skin
where the strap has pressed. A patch rubbed pink on my ribs. The IV marks on my hand.
My wrists are clear since they started using the softer restraints. More bruising up by my throat. A red welt on my cheek from the branches in the woods at Raxter.
With my eyes open there would be more.
* * *
—
They come in to move the body. The body, that’s what I’m saying instead of you know.
Three people, their faces covered. They pick the body up. They put it in a bag.
“Did she do that to him?” one of them says.
“Nah,” says the other. “You should’ve seen it. Kid did it himself. Not sure there was anybody home anymore, if you know what I mean.”
That’s what the Tox does when it doesn’t want you. Like the twins, Emily and Christine. Like Taylor’s girlfriend, Mary. You were watching, I want to say. You must’ve seen.
“How come she hasn’t done it yet?”
“Dr. Paretta says it’s her hormones. Says they help her get along with it a little better.”
They carry the body out. I stay. I am sitting, and there is red on the soles of my feet. I’m not looking at anything. No, no, I’m not looking at anything. I will never look at anything again.
* * *
—
I expect them to move me. I expect them to put the IV back in my arm, to do up the restraints again. But nobody comes and nobody minds when I move to the empty gurney next to mine.
When I sleep, he is there.
When I wake, he is there too.
* * *
—
When it’s my turn it is only Paretta. I roll over, close my eyes, but she uncurls my limbs and sits me up. An oxygen tank waiting by my bed, tubing and mask bright yellow.
“Well,” Paretta says. “I’m awfully sorry.”
Nothing to say to her. I just stare, and stare, even when she puts the whiteboard in my hands.
She sits down on the edge of the gurney. Teddy gone, and she is covered from head to toe, skin showing only around her eyes. When she reaches out I let her. Let her push my hair off my face, wipe the crusted spit from the corner of my mouth.
“I brought you something,” she says. From one of the pockets in her plastic suit, she pulls out a Raxter Iris. A little bit crumpled, the stem splitting, but the petals are still blue. It’s still alive. “You liked them downstairs, I think, so. Here.”
She gives it to me, and I cradle it in my palms. Indigo drape and the barest spots of yellow hidden at the center. Hetty used to pick them for me during the summers and tuck them in my hair.
“Listen,” Paretta says. “We can’t stay here anymore. There’s Teddy, and something happened at your school, and our study’s been ended. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
I think she’s waiting for me to absolve her. Instead, I close my eyes and hold the iris up to my nose. Sweet, and something of salt, of Raxter.
“All right,” I hear her say, and the wheels of the oxygen tank squeak as she rolls it closer. “You just have to breathe, okay? It’s as easy as that.”
I keep my eyes shut as she slips the oxygen mask over my nose, tightens the straps so it stays in place. Doesn’t bother strapping my hands down, keeps her touch gentle and soft. She knows there’s no fight left in me.
A moment, and then a hiss, a valve releasing. I look at Paretta, and I make sure she’s watching as I breathe deep, and I let it in.
It’s like when you drink water for the first time in a long time, how you can feel the cold in your veins. Except it isn’t cold, it’s a fizzing kind of heat, catching and growing.
I won’t mind ending this way.
Paretta gets up, and I think she’s leaving when she stops at the foot of my bed. “Tell me one thing,” she says. “If you can. I’ve been trying to understand how Teddy got sick.”
I manage a shrug.
“Because nobody else did,” she goes on. “And I can’t think of anything he did differently.”
Oh. I can.
Teddy taking off his mask, Teddy with his hands in my hair, Teddy disappearing and something else taking root inside. I pick up the whiteboard, and I write:
I kissed him would that do it
For a moment Paretta just stares. And then she laughs, only it sounds like something else.
“Good luck,” she tells me, and turns quickly so I can’t see her face. A click, and the door is shut.
Over the announcement system a woman says it’s time to begin evacuation procedures. I can hear people moving, talking, all calm and measured. No panic. No rush. They’ve known this was coming.
* * *
—
A twitch in my legs, and a thrum running through me. Like a plane engine before flight, like the moment before a flare-up but bigger, so much bigger. My body shaking, my body pulling apart at the seams, and I close my eyes, but it doesn’t matter. I can still see. I am still here.
Sweat across my forehead, and this is too much, I wasn’t built for this, I can feel something moving in me, behind my ribs, up to my heart, and the air is squeezing out of me
I can’t
Not like before not like the glitter and the calm this is fracture this is breaking
this is an ending I wasn’t supposed to let go
The tips of my fingers they’re turning black a Raxter Blue and it all disappears everything until out of my chest like a column of light a scream
I’m nothing
I’m
I’m done.
And now, now it hurts.
* * *
—
I sit up, the iris falling to the floor, and I hold my fingertips under the light. Black, like I dipped them in ink. It reaches all the way to my knuckles.
This is what happens to things when they’re from Raxter, when the island’s knit itself into their bones. This is what happens to them when they’re dying.
I push the oxygen mask off my face. It’s done its job.
I get out of bed and stay close to the wall as I make for the door. My legs are steady enough, but I can feel the weakness in them. They’ll give out before long. I take a short rest at the gurney next to the door and lean close to the window looking out into the corridor. My reflection stares back at me. The skin under my eyes is mottled blue and yellow. Even through my hospital gown I can tell my ribs are pushing out, and my hair is matted, stiff with sweat.
And then I see it. In my arm, there, a flicker in the mirror. A bulge in the flesh, a shiver in my skin. I can feel a pulse in my wrist, patterned like a heartbeat. I am dying, and the darkness inside me is trying to flee. I press my finger against the burning skin and feel something recoil. A tendon, maybe. But maybe something else.
Leave it alone, part of me says, keep it for yourself, but if I am dying, I won’t do it as anybody but me.
I find a scalpel under the bed by the door. Trace a light line down the inside of my arm. The blade is cool against the heat of my skin, blood beading faintly.
The same line, but I press this time, drag the blade slow. Blood like this is rich and dark. It wells up until it spills over, trails down to my elbow. Again, and again, until a tingling spreads through my wrist, until I know I’ve hit something deep. Pain, gripping and everywhere, and a scream through my body, but I am always hurting and I know what to do.
Put down the scalpel, pry my skin apart with slick fingers. A flash of bone, and the world is swimming around me, vivid and blurred. I slide my thumb and forefinger in, swallow a whimper, and spread the sides of the cut.
I don’t know until I see it, but then it moves. Glistening, thick like a muscle. Twitching softly and radiating heat. A worm.
I try to pinch it between my fingers, but it’s too slippery, so I keep trying, keep wishing somebody had left a clamp lying around. It’s writhing
now. It knows what I’m doing. And finally, I get a good grip and yank it out of me.
It’s like ripping out a fishhook. A tear in my flesh, and blood springs up fresh. But it doesn’t matter now. I have it in my hands. It’s dead, or dying, not moving at all, and I can get a good look. The color fading, a milky white showing through underneath. Ridged and segmented down the length of it. And it’s long, could run maybe from the tip of my middle finger to my wrist. A parasite. It was inside me and I didn’t even know.
A violation, but a gift too. It let me find a reason for everything I felt, at Raxter, in Boston, and every day in between. It let me match my body to my mind. I can thank it for that, at least.
I look back at the window to see my reflection, to see if I look different. But I don’t. Same me, same old same old but I think I think maybe something is missing
It doesn’t matter anymore. I tear up my sheet, bandage my arm stain spreading and I get to my feet. I don’t want to be where they put me when it happens.
* * *
—
My clothes are in the cabinet behind my bed, sealed up in a biohazard bag. I rip it open with my teeth and take them out jacket, shirt, jeans, and in their own bag, my torn-up boots.
I clutch them tight against me, breathe in the cold salt smell. This is enough to make me my own again.
By the time I get everything on, my legs are trembling. I find the iris where it fell, hold it tight, and hobble to the door, push it open with my shoulder. There’s a wheelchair just outside. I manage a few last steps over to it, let my body collapse into the seat.
The lock is manual, a catch I have to release and a handle I have to bear down on hard. And then there’s some maneuvering, and I almost throw up because I’m so tired and my stomach is so empty, but I get it moving. Down the hallway. The way the way somebody took me when we went outside.
Something drips down over my upper lip. Slow, like syrup, with a taste almost like blood, but sour. I wipe it off don’t look at where it stains my hand.