“We were switched before birth,” she liked to joke about Kurt. She fit in so much better with his German-Irish Catholic family, and in a parallel world, Kurt would have been much happier in hers. Mary’s vague ambition to one day run a daycare center out of her home was applauded by Kurt’s parents, while his artistic impulses—mostly ignored, at times derided by his folks—would have been nurtured to the fullest if he had been born into her clan instead. Mary was the first member of her family not to go to Choate. She said she’d bombed the entrance exam on purpose. But she would have done poorly regardless of her effort. She wasn’t stupid, just simple, content with whatever knowledge landed in her lap, curious about her world, but only to a point. She felt no need to waste time reading that the woods were lovely, dark, and deep when she could just go there and see for herself. She was looking forward to marrying Kurt as soon as she was eighteen and wanted nothing more than to start a family.
“Her parents hated me long before the accident,” Kurt told Sarah. “I don’t blame them. I’d bring her home drunk or stoned, she’d have twigs and pine needles and sap in her hair. Those expensive sweaters they bought her would be all ripped. They’d say, ‘What were you doing, Mary? Rolling around in the forest?’ And she was so goddamn sweet she couldn’t lie. To anyone. She’d look at them with her full-moon eyes and just say, ‘Yes.’ ”
Kurt cleaned the dust off another picture frame he pulled out from under his bed and handed it to Sarah. It was a badly scanned photograph of Mary, printed at a drugstore, but Sarah could see, even in this slightly pixilated, desaturated form, how beautiful and unself-conscious the girl was. It was a picture of her smiling face, a scrap of shadow creeping up under her chin, suggesting Kurt, her photographer, hovering above her, probably in some delightful springtime field. She was so heartbreakingly pretty. Even the bump on the bridge of her nose was pretty, as though her beauty was so powerful it cracked under its own weight, becoming greater from the resulting flaw.
About two years into their relationship, Kurt had crashed Mary’s car into a tree. They had just left Kurt’s parents’ house. He was drunk but she was drunker and so he reasoned it was better for him to drive. Rain pelted the metal roof like gunfire and the windshield wipers swung hysterically to keep up, offering brief, vanishing glimpses of the road.
He woke up in a hospital and was quickly transferred to South Middlesex Correctional. Mary had survived the accident, he would learn from his parents. He had no idea what kind of condition she was in, only that she was alive. After he’d served his time, her parents forbade him from seeing her. “You ruined her!” her father raged, his breath so saturated with scotch it could catch fire.
“What happened to her—it would have been better if she had died,” Kurt said to Sarah, who was still holding Mary’s picture in her lap. “A couple months after I got out of jail, her mother wrote me a weird letter. Said she’d had a ‘spiritual awakening’—her words, not mine—and wanted me over to their house for lunch on Last Day. I didn’t know what to expect.”
Mary’s mother had greeted him at the door with a vodka tonic, as if Kurt were her husband coming home from work. Her actual husband, Mary’s father, had left the country. “He’s taken his grief into exile,” Mary’s mother explained, offering no more on the subject. They sat around drinking in the sunroom while the Azorean woman they’d hired to take care of Mary got her dressed and ready upstairs. Mary’s mother offered Kurt a Librium, and when he refused, she told him, “I was afraid for so long that you were going to ruin her life. I hated you for that. And now that you have, and the worst has happened, I can’t hate you anymore.”
“Please, just let me see her.”
“Get ready, young man,” her mother warned.
What finally emerged from the upstairs bedrooms was a wild animal in the shape of Mary. A scar ran up the back of her skull and onto her forehead, a satin strip where the hair refused to grow back. Half of her face sagged and her eyebrows had grown bushy and uneven. Even her eyes had changed. It was as though the human light in them had been snuffed out.
“She started screaming when she saw me. Brayed, like a donkey. She hit herself in the face and wouldn’t stop. The CNA had to force some liquid tranquilizer down her throat to get her to stop. Then we all sat in their goddamn sunroom and had lunch together. It was awful. Her mother drank and this nurse’s aide pretended the spoon was an airplane and pushed tuna salad into Mary’s mouth. She’d chew and then drool half of it back out. When she swallowed, the aide clapped for her. I wished that she had died. Or that I had died. That we could have died together. Then right when I thought things could not be worse, Mary shit her pants at the table. While her mother and the nurse were changing her diaper upstairs, I just got up and left and never looked back.”
Sarah handed the framed photo back to him. Kurt placed it in a backpack along with the other effects.
“So we’re going to see her again?” Sarah asked.
“She died, finally, two years later. Pneumonia. Her immune system was wrecked after the accident.”
“Then where are we going with all this stuff?”
“To her sister. This belongs to her, not me. I should have done this years ago.” Kurt folded his hands over his stomach for a moment. He looked scared. He rearranged the contents of the backpack so that everything fit and belted it shut. What Sarah thought were tassels dangling from the top flap turned out to be long strands of hair.
“It’s a cool backpack.”
“She made it. She’s an artist,” Kurt said, swishing the strands around with his fingers. “Her sister, I mean, not Mary. It’s Mary’s hair, but that could be a lie. Her sister is—look, Sarah, I don’t want to go there alone, but I don’t want to force you into something you can’t handle. If you want, I’ll drive you home right now, or anywhere else you want to go. It’s been nice to have someone listen to me, someone who’s smart. Not some drunk girl who’s gonna end up causing trouble. Not someone who thinks she’s cute and deserves a free tattoo.”
He lifted up his motorcycle helmet and offered it to her.
“I mean it. No pressure. If you want to go home, I have a plan B.”
“What’s that?”
“Go down to one of the bonfires. Burn this stuff. Go to a bar and get drunk.”
“I don’t want you to do that,” she said. “I’ll go with you to make amends to this sister. But afterward, we’re going to watch the sunset on the beach.”
LONG BEFORE THERE was sleep, there was night, Earth rolling away from the sun as a lover in a bed. But now such darkness is an old dream. The light of cities, of towns, and the highways connecting them, rupture the black hemisphere, bleeding through the membrane of night. Tokyo appeared to Yui as a great hemorrhage of electricity, and somewhere inside it his brother lay dead. Weeks of looking through these windows had taught Yui to recognize the particular patterns of Tokyo on sight, a homing mechanism that failed to soothe him as he floated now alone in the dark. He wished all the lights of Tokyo would shut off, then all the lights in Asia, so that the world could disappear into the black space surrounding it.
Right now the monk was sitting with Tadeshi’s body. Yui had seen to that right away. His sister-in-law was too hysterical and had to be medicated. Yui had called upon Chiyo, his company’s COO, to handle the details in his stead. The cremation could proceed but interment of his brother’s ashes, Yui had instructed Chiyo, would wait until he returned. He’d given his sister-in-law permission to pick the bones out of Tadeshi’s ashes along with an uncle neither Yui nor his brother had felt any special emotion toward, but who could serve as a representative of the generation that preceded the brothers, a link to their father, who had died a few years back. His nephews were too young and spoiled to be trusted with this task, and his own wife and children had always been resentful of Tadeshi, who was closer to Yui than they could ever hope to be.
B
ecause of multiple failures in their connection, these arrangements had taken hours to discuss, with voices stilted and screens stalled, cutting off in the middle of a sob. At one point Yui had to confront the immobile face of his wife frozen mid-yawn on the screen of his laptop. He hated her for yawning, for feeling anything, for being so near his brother when he was not.
But it was all settled now. There was nothing left for him to do but float in the Cupola and look at the world spinning below. Mission Control had offered their sincere, uneasy condolences. They’d granted the three men a work dispensation for the next day. Yui was getting his Last Day holiday after all.
KAREN REMEMBERED THE day she met Dennis better than she remembered anything else that happened before or after.
“Pack for a trip,” her mother had told her, thrusting a plastic shopping bag into her hand. Karen packed a sweatshirt, a bathing suit, a stuffed rabbit, an old cigarette carton filled with remarkable-looking rocks, a handful of crayons bound by a rubber band, and a pad of paper. She fell asleep in the car, so there was no way of determining how long or how far they’d driven. She woke up when her mother was pulling her out of the car to lead her up the stairs to an apartment above a convenience store. It was summer. She was done with school and eager to go back. The length of a summer was for her an immeasurable gulf, and when was an impossible question always dangling off the precipice of her mind—when could she go back to school, when was it time to go home, when would she be able to drive, when was Christmas, when was supper.
“When I say so,” her mother always responded, and if Karen argued, she got pinched until a bruise appeared.
The air inside the apartment was hot and still. Dennis was there with his father, or the man Karen assumed was his father. She never actually knew, until this day, if that was true. His father was smoking a cigarette out of the corner of his mouth, blowing smoke out of his nostrils, grunting as he tried to heave an air conditioner onto the windowsill.
“Be careful, you moron, or you’ll kill someone on the sidewalk,” her mother said to this man. Like they’d known each other for a long time and she had earned her right to be annoyed by him ages ago.
The man said nothing. Neither did Dennis. He was sitting on a white leather couch, his eyes lowered, already ashamed.
Years later she would try to describe Dennis to people, but she never could. Sometimes when she lay awake at night, she would try to remember his face and falter. He had two eyes, a nose, a mouth. He had ears and hair, a chin. A way of walking all his own. A voice. She could picture these things in her heart but not in her mind, as though Dennis were a ghost that could be felt but not seen. He was Dennis. He looked exactly like Dennis. What more could she say?
That summer day so long ago, Karen had run around the empty little apartment with a last gust of energy, and for once her mother did not yell at her to stop or slow down. In the bathroom hung a set of new towels with the tags still on them. On the tank of the toilet sat an Easter basket Karen recognized as hers from earlier in the year, full of tiny motel soaps, strands of green plastic grass still tangled into the basket’s weave. In the kitchen, there was a large gap in the counter where a stove should have been and a hole in the wall sprouting a few pointless wires. In the living room was just the white couch where Dennis sat.
There was nothing else, except the bedroom, which is where she and Dennis would remain for the next year. Some of the people who came brought them presents of candy or Halloween costumes and took lots of pictures. Others hated them for no reason Karen could ever discern. One man liked to cover their entire heads with a dark wool hat and call them by different names. Another spanked them, then afterward held them and cried. Their own parents seemed indifferent. But there were some visitors who said they came for love.
“I drove for miles just to see you,” one man said. “After I saw your pictures, I got in a car and didn’t stop once. I peed in a bottle. All the way from Ohio. Do you know how far that is?”
Dennis did and Karen didn’t. Karen was seven, lagging behind in school because of so much absence, just beginning to master her letters. A was still a tepee in her mind, housing wild Indians intoning the vowel in a long, unbroken chant. Aaaaaaaaaaaaah. B was a yellowjacket denuded of its stinger as it flew away from a painful welt. C was a cookie only partially eaten. K was a stick figure of Karen herself, but only half of her. Where was the other half?
Dennis was nine years old. He told her that he hated school, and offered no explanation.
After the apartment was raided, a foster family had kept Dennis and Karen together. It had seemed like the right thing to do, until it became clear that it wasn’t. Karen was always sneaking into Dennis’s bed at night. To stop her from kissing everyone with an open mouth, her foster mother, a Catholic, put red pepper flakes on her tongue and made her sit in the corner with her hands on her head to stop the little girl from touching herself so much. When it was time to start first grade, Karen was transferred to a new house. She hadn’t seen Dennis since.
REDEMPTION AS AN armband for the stocky war veteran who stubbornly, angrily, refused a free beer. REDEMPTION, one letter per knuckle, on the hands of the actor who’d recently given up on Los Angeles and moved back home to Boston. REDEMPTION written vertically down the side of the rib cage and onto the hip of the pretty young brunette who couldn’t stop crying about someone named Hailee.
“I just miss her so much,” she said. “I can’t stand it. I don’t want to live without her.”
“Sweetheart, I’ve been there,” Jake said to her. “Everyone in this shop has been there. Even the ugly old miserable bastards you can’t imagine anyone touching, let alone fucking, have been there.”
She blinked at him, the tears for one moment suspended, her sadness quivering in her eyes like the last dream to bring you from sleep into morning.
“Just tell me it’s going to be okay,” she said to Jake.
“It will probably get worse. But then it will be okay.”
DEATH AND DISEASE didn’t scare Kurt, but Mary’s sister did. Whenever he’d spent holidays with Mary and her family, her sister had spoken to him in the same brisk tone her parents used, if she talked to him at all. Far worse was when she would walk away from Kurt and Mary in the middle of a conversation and not return. “What the hell?” Kurt asked Mary once. “Oh, she gets bored easily,” was Mary’s placid answer.
So it came as a shock when this witchy sister spent Mary’s share of their trust fund, which had transferred to her, on Kurt’s outstanding legal fees. Stranger still when she picked him up and took him home to her bed the night he was released from prison. He had always assumed she hated him before the accident. He would learn in the manic six months that followed that night that hate and love were indistinguishable passions for her, and that the expression of either was always for her a form of punishment.
She was the exact opposite of Mary, who was guileless and sweet, almost mentally disabled by optimism. What the sisters had in common was that they both recognized Kurt’s talent, though the elder sister was less starstruck.
“You’re a hand, not an eye,” she told Kurt.
“What does that mean?”
“You’ve got skills but not talent. You’re a craftsman, not an artist.”
There was malice in her assessment, but a brutal honesty, too, which brought Kurt a tremendous sense of relief: he could finally accept his limitations and build from there. He’d never be in a gallery or a museum but he was good enough to start a tattoo business, and that was good enough for him. It was Mary’s sister who had come up with the name Redemption Tattoo, and fronted him ten thousand dollars to start out, only to disappear a few days before the grand opening, hopping a flight to Guatemala without so much as a goodbye.
Every time Kurt had started to feel stable, the demons of his past muted to a low murmur he could mostly ignore, a message in his inbox would
appear like clockwork from MorningStar76, Mary’s sister, reminding him of all the things he had done and would never do, what he was and what he wasn’t, how different, interesting, and real his life could be if he had never left her, as though the fact was not that she had left him. She’d haunted him with the unwanted details of her hateful sex life, tales of the poverty and squalor she elected to live in, the shantytowns in Africa, the South American slums, the weird cult-like ashrams in India where she was ritualistically molested by purported gurus. And always, at the end of each letter, she would urge Kurt to drop everything, to give everything up, and come to her.
Kurt refused to respond to these emails, though he read each one carefully, chewed on them until his jaws actually ached during many sleepless nights (the sleeping pills he took now more or less resolved this). But her most recent message had been different. It was terse and gentle, saying that she was in town for the Last Day holiday and that she’d love a visitor. Here was her address, if he wanted to stop by. He had sat on this prospect like an egg, waiting for the answer to hatch beneath him, freeing him from the true mammalian labor of birthing a decision himself. It was only this morning, in the fugue of nihilistic and ethereal hope that was the Last Day, that Kurt had been moved to write her back. He regretted it now.
The sun fired at the earth in invisible rays, striking the pavement so that it glittered like a large elusive fish swimming in and out of a net of shadows. Every traffic light on the way to her address winked green at his approach, and he wondered if her sorcery was responsible for this, as mindfuckery was her typical foreplay. He hoped Sarah would protest or offer up a new plan, a bunch of high school kids getting stoned in the woods somewhere, something, anything but this. But Sarah was agreeable, though a little tense, wanting only to follow him wherever he went.
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