The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  “Yes,” I say and open the door.

  “Listen,” says Emily. “You know I’m here for support. I’m not going to scrub your tile or pay your electric bill, but if that thing trips you out. If you get nerves. I’m right here.”

  The neighbor, from her side of the fence, still tracks after us even as we move into the house. As I open windows against the mustiness that has gathered in my absence, I can hear her continuing to call. “It might not have been a raccoon,” she says. “Your boyfriend? Meaty guy with the weird hands? Works out a lot? Is that your boyfriend? I’ve seen him here, too.” Her head bobs along on the far side of her hedge.

  Emily finds the sliding glass doors off the white-carpeted living room, looks out onto my little deck, its inviting Adirondack lounger. “I’ll be on the patio,” she says. “But just call.”

  I nod, watch her settle herself out back, and take out the flashcards she’s made herself for the CPA exam. The red light on my landline blinks. There have been calls, a hundred and seven calls. I press play.

  Blank, they’re like blanks—empty audio with a diabetic huff at the back of them, a silence like a string of question marks and then—

  “Hello? Mellie? I’ve had time to think, and—can’t thank you enough—kind of a breakthrough—something I think I should—urgent, otherwise, I wouldn’t call. Please call. I know I can’t ask for you to—something you need to know.” I scrawl a few lines and then stop. It’s not the documentarian I’m afraid of. I delete the messages and head to the second floor.

  Climbing the pale, carpeted stairs, I observe the stain of Juni’s mishap, the dried dribble of regurgitated ketchup. I thought I was doing well, taking her on those long white-knuckle strolls, chewing the inside of my mouth, dying every second to get high. You tell yourself, she’s only a baby; you tell yourself everyone screws up sometimes. But there are some mistakes that do not rub out. Still, it’s not stains on the carpet that scare me.

  Alone at home, with a small child, every rustle, every sudden wakening is a blow. Juni was just barely past a newborn when I took this place. I didn’t have any childcare, and I didn’t know how you got it, but the baby slept constantly and I thought I would work around her. I’d been alone so much of my life, it seemed I’d be less lonely with a drowsing baby than I’d been before, so I’d put her down and wait for word of the job I’d promised to do. Was I waiting on Lew? Now I return to that feeling, I find something else inside of it, something more like dread. There was much I might have noticed, then, that I did not attend to.

  “So shoot me,” Lew is fond of saying, and he’s not kidding. He is a man who courts violence, who maybe prefers it to more ordinary forms of human interaction. “Come sit by me, Mellie,” he’d tell me, patting the chair beside him with a greasy hand. “Come keep an old man company,” and I would. He’s like a father figure, like as in Darth Vader is a father figure or Fagin or, I don’t know, from Plath. I thought, in those months I spent waiting, Lew was punishing me. But I can see now that that is loser thinking, deluded thinking.

  I remember the endless journey in a Greyhound bus. I remember an interval beneath the pine trees, cabins in the distance. I had come to do a thing, but some warning, a red wall between me and it, had intervened, something had sent me here instead.

  Through the upstairs window, I can see Emily settling herself into my red Adirondack chair, beginning to review the flashcards in advance of her CPA exam this week.

  One criterion for a capital lease is that the term of the lease must equal a minimum percentage of the leased property’s economic life at the inception of the lease. The minimum percentage is:

  A: 75%

  B: 41%

  C: 50%

  D: 90%

  The sun is bright, the little walled space of my patio pleasant and private, and Emily must be trying to think her way into the future, to think about getting past the crap with Leo’s dad and the encroaching exam and finally to a place where she might begin to acquire some of the good things I have here. She’s not above it, a certain petty jealousy for all I’ve been given without deserving it. I am on the second floor where the air is sour, the standing water in the sinks, the forgotten garbage cans in the bathrooms with their rank human waste, the full diaper pails. But it is not the stink that scares me.

  I try to hang onto the feeling from the van, singing and blossoms and the news about Juni but something grim has settled inside me. I remove my phone from its Ziploc and plug it in to charge. Text after text, lines and lines of question marks from the burner phone. As I enter the study, a sense of disturbance visits me. Here and there, a film cell, a theater ticket, a beeper number written in my adolescent hand, have drifted to the carpet. The scatter reminds me of cloud paper, the floor of my car, the mornings-after after mornings-after that had been my life for so many years. But it isn’t cloud that scares me.

  My paperback, where I have kept my life, is on my desk. It’s a lunatic object, the kind of thing you’d recover from the serial bomber’s cabin, its spine duct-taped, its pages lacquered with layers of glue. I think of the documentarian’s map, of the drawer where Emily collects trinkets from another life. Maybe we all have them, these illegible keys to a past we’ll never recover. Perhaps these repositories are not always keys, but are sometimes the locked vaults themselves, the things within meant to remain. As such, they fail. Things are always falling out. This scattering on the floor may be random. Some window may have been left open. Perhaps there really was a raccoon. Maybe nothing has yet escaped. These things might be true, but as I place my hand on the tattered cover, my sense of disturbance deepens.

  Someone has been here, but it’s not the stranger I’m afraid of.

  I sit, tap a few keys on the keyboard, and the computer hums to life. There is a small object protruding from the hard drive, a new file sitting on the crowded desktop. For encryption purposes, Lew relied on a system of onion routing which ricocheted his data through volunteer servers, Azerbaijan to Cleveland to Quito to Dakar. Now, the signal begins to travel. Valerie Weston, her gorgeous body, begins to walk back and forth. Don’t talk to me like I’m some animal, she says in her throaty smoker’s voice. I let her pace, in the background. The nausea is there, fainter now, but more recognizable. I locate the shadow of the boom, momentarily appearing on a tile. I hear a muffled cough from off camera, observe the pantomime of the actress washing her hands in a dummy sink. Does it fascinate? I understand what Emily has been describing, that this is a film which changes as you look at it, is chimera. But it is too familiar, too intimate, to enrapture me. Some part of me knows what is coming next.

  My fingers call up Ruin Tape. I have practiced deliberate blindness, but I think of Emily and her perfect Leo, the messages sent in our illness which our sobriety might allow us to read. There are things it is time to know, and this is what I’m afraid of.

  Peach dust. She is different, in motion, from her still image: monstrous, but something else as well. I zoom in, absorb the bruises on her exposed skin, her stained clothes. This is a woman who has forgotten her body, whose body she drags around with her. In cloud, we are easy. She is not easy. For the first few frames, she faces away from the hidden camera. She makes tiny, precise gestures on the workbench. A brush stroke, the turning of a page. If you did not know what you were looking for, you would have no idea what these motions mean. But now I see her replace the cap on a pot of rubber cement. Carefully, carefully, she is sealing a tiny object between the pages of a book.

  She turns. I must hold myself in place to look at her. Her face is not a human’s face. The tissue beneath the surface is so inflamed that the skin at her hairline has begun to rupture. Under her glasses her eyes are like boiled eggs, but the slit that reveals the pupils gleams with purpose. She is me. It’s no dream, no metaphor. Her mouth is a puncture in the risen dough of her face, but my mouth forms the same grim line. I know she is thinking about the thing she has sealed into the book. She is thinking she should have destroyed it, but that she
lacked the strength. This thing, it tells the story of how she was ruined, and she cannot ruin that thing. So, instead, it must remain inside, always. This is the ending she has scripted. A woman destroyed, she holds her splitting self apart to make this argument. This thing will still exist, but it will never be released.

  Data travels. Dakar links to Kuala Lumpur. Kuala Lumpur links to Brussels, Brussels to Bruges, Bruges to Ostend.

  The peach dust rises, and slowly the woman fades into it. This is what cloud does to us. It lessens us, and lessens us, until we fade into a single dimension. She is detestable, but I find I do not detest her. I owe the feeling which surfaces in me to Emily, waiting below on the deck. I owe it to the driver of the van with his dumped postal sack, and to Niani and Althea and Marisa’s five-year-old; I owe it to the Uno’s crew and I owe it to Juni, her lungs filling with clean air: because of what I have absorbed from them, this unexpected feeling rises in me. It’s a feeling like I have for the newcomers at the meeting, booze still on their breath, arms scabbed, stinking of their rising hunger. You’ll make it, I think. You’ll make it. The numbers aren’t on anyone’s side, but in the moment, I will believe it of them anyway.

  So now I say it to the woman in the video. You’ll make it, I tell myself. Even if you can’t see it now, someday, you’ll be able to take this thing out again. Now, it’s up to me to steer this thing as best I can. My fingers find the sealed pages in my book. My fingernail slips in too easily. The pages barely crack as I open them. The thing is gone. Someone has removed it. Despair beckoning, I read its imprint—hard and small, the size and thickness of a penny. Right angles, or almost. On one side, I can see the impression of its circuitry, the toothed protrusions. And yet—something, something I’ve seen tells me it is not too late.

  I shift my attention to the woman walking back and forth. The counter on the screen is still ticking down. Twenty-six hours, thirteen minutes.

  The small protrusion from my hard drive. It’s a chip reader. My intruder has left it behind. Why has it been left here? What does it mean?

  Beneath the sea, the signal travels via fiber optic cable. Port of Boston. Dudley Square. The signal travels down my block. The new window on my desktop responds. They are speaking to each other, my machine and this video. They have found something in each other they know.

  The open browser windows shift into alignment. The Valerie Weston video slides to the left side of the screen. The first thirty seconds. The beginning. A hand reaches for the waistband of the panties and the image stills.

  The swollen woman appears to her right. What happened in the end.

  Between them is a blank space. The missing middle.

  Click yes to continue?

  I tap a key.

  There is just one frame more in the headless woman video before the malicious program begins to worm into my hard drive. The wrist, flicking upward as the waistband releases. The hand at the waistband, the hand at the SUV window: just a bit too girlish to be cool. He, Apollo Blue, is about to enter the frame. The man in the video, the man in my driveway. I make the match, and this time I do not resist it. Prince cigarette, his skin against my skin, his body gold in the light. My man, whenever he came from. Mine.

  Between Apollo and the swollen woman, the title of the missing part inserts itself. Found Footage. The coming attraction. The countdown. How we got from there to here.

  Something folds. Pixels collect, align. It is him I am waiting for, Apollo. I wait for him to step into the waiting frame, to tell me the terrible story. Colors flash. Vertical bars appear and stretch. For an instant, something almost materializes—a bed, two figures—and then it is decaying into digits. They seem to tumble and fall toward the edges of the window; the code sings to me, as in a cloud high. I know it. Not images but code.

  The logic I am inside is the logic of trap, of things cinching in. I jog the mouse button. I give the monitor a slap.

  The Seychelles portal opens. The link awaits, as before, but the instructions below have changed. We’re here. We’ve arrived. Where are you? And where is the thing you have?

  Panicked, I yank the card reader from the port, and perhaps just in time. My screen goes black.

  From far away, I hear a phone ringing. Emily’s voice lifts through the open window, a rising tone signaling concern. The slant acoustics, my fog, I receive her message as if it ricochets through Azerbaijan.

  As if at a delay, my own phone begins to ring. The string of question mark texts lights up. The burner phone is calling. I pick up.

  “Hello, Amelia.” His voice is gummy; his throat rumbles with cough. I hear the exhalation of a cigarette smoke. “We have a problem we need to discuss.”

  “Apollo?” I say.

  “Not yet, lady honey. Not quite. But you can help me with that.”

  “You were here,” I say. “You saw the file.”

  “I thought that was it, lady honey. But it’s just numbers on a screen.”

  “I know who has it,” I say. “There’s still time.”

  All the windows on the bottom floor are open, and I can hear Emily speaking. She says verdict and release and Leo and home.

  “I can get a ride,” she says. “Just don’t let him out of your sight. Mellie? Are you there? I need a ride.”

  Over the line, there is a strange doubling. The sound of a car engine. It repeats.

  “You know,” says the man on the phone. “You know who has it. But do you know how to find him?”

  Slow. I am slow as I descend the stairs, dazed. “I know who has it,” I say. “But I’m not sure—”

  “You’ve been there,” he coaxes. “After it all went down.”

  Inside the garage, the light is dim, the air yellow through the dusty portals. I see Emily’s head bobbing as she opens the gate from the patio and begins to move toward the front of the house.

  “There are tall pines. There are tall pines, by a lake shore. Cabins in the distance.”

  “Mellie?” calls Emily again. “Mellie?”

  “Right here,” I say, or try to say. My voice is so slow, so low.

  “I’ve got the map right here. That narrows it down,” says the man. I hear the rustling of paper. “But still, I’m going to need insurance, lady honey. I think I’m going to have to take you with me.”

  A car pulls into the driveway. An SUV. A door slams.

  The figure through the dusty glass might be anyone’s, but his hand is the same. The feeling returns. Molasses and campfire. My armaments, all the weak wisdom I’ve collected, every little bundle I’ve made of desires—tremble. Then, as his gaze passes over the garage windows, his brow furrowed, his face flashing uncertainty, I realize he doesn’t know my face either.

  And now is when the bad thing begins. He turns away from me as Emily steps into the driveway.

  She asks: “Where’s the other guy? Where’s the van?”

  I am in motion. I fumble the garage door opener, then punch the button, but it glitches or I am doing it wrong, and the door doesn’t lift. The gears grind and whine. I try again. I smell cigarette smoke. I press the button again.

  My neighbor calls out. “It’s him. He’s come.”

  Inch by inch, the windows disappear into the garage roof, and then I can see underneath, the bottom of a black SUV, the plate not yet visible. I drop to the ground and begin to roll toward the maddening lift gate, its slow inches. Everything is going wrong. I see feet moving, Emily’s and the man’s, before they pass behind the high hedges. Four inches, five. It grinds. I push at the metal, and wedge myself beneath.

  “Four lakes,” he says. “Four campsites, four lakes. You think we can cover that in twenty-six hours?”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” Emily stops in front of him.

  “I’m done with you playing dumb,” he says.

  A fist closes around a handful of her shirt, her blue t-shirt. Emily folds into herself, shielding her face from some threat. It is a posture I can see she has learned well. In the sunlight now, I
stand. He drags her toward the SUV.

  “Help me,” she calls. “For God’s sake, help me.”

  “Somewhere in there, I know you know. I told you to dig. But it seems you need a little boost,” he says and then he is stuffing paper into her mouth. Scraps drift around them.

  “You’re hurting her,” shrieks my neighbor. “You’re going to hurt her.”

  Emily’s eyes find mine. I lunge as the door closes on her.

  “No,” I scream. “No. Let her go.”

  There is the screech of tires and the black vehicle careens into the street. I run after them. I make out what could be California plates. What could be a small white sticker. The man pulls a one-handed turn, coming abreast of the house on the driver’s side. It’s a marvelous piece of driving, confident and professional. The window is down. It is as before, everything on repeat. He pauses, and I watch his faceless face watch mine. One woman, turning into two.

  “It’s me you want,” I say. “I’m the one.”

  Then the gears grind, the tires spin, and the car roars away.

  “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God,” my neighbor wails.

  They are halfway down the street. They are turning and Emily is gone. There’s her dropped purse on the sidewalk. On the ground around me lies the scattered remnants of a twofer of cloud, but Emily, my Emily, is gone.

  Eleven

  New York City

  1993

  I finally stop shaking from my encounter with Mr. Boyfriend when my taxi drops me in front of the St. Mark’s Theater. It is too early for anyone to be awake, but the door is propped and I let myself in. The attic dormitory has the same apocalypse after-party aspect as it had on my first visit. The air smells of booze and weed. Someone has installed little art projects of melted spoons. In the bathroom, I find a garbage can full of the moist ashes of a burnt roll of toilet paper. I see the signs of a game of brutal honesty, a circle of chairs around a suitcase. Bodies, asleep, lie across the floor like a massacre. The director is among them with his fist around a hank of Nadine’s hair. I find Paul on one of the iron beds, toe to head with Ned, the former lead, his nail-polished toes grazing Paul’s cheek. Both boys are all still in stage makeup, their pillows smeared with the Turin shrouds of their faces. Paul wears the broken leather cuff I’d found in his messenger bag a few days earlier; it has been mended with electrical tape. The sling is back on him, too.