The Likely World

by Melanie Conroy-Goldman

  Downstairs, I dial, from the landline. Think—

  “911,” says the operator. “Can you hold please?”

  Police logic, Roslindale cop thinking, would peg this as a domestic situation. Emily’s ex, obviously, the one just released. We run with a bad crowd, Emily and I, with junkies and ex-junkies and criminals and pornographers.

  “Can you tell me your emergency?”

  “Someone’s been taken,” I say.

  “Can you describe the perpetrator?”

  “I—it’s a black SUV.”

  “Do you have the plate number?”

  The things I know cannot help them. The oval sticker, numbers on a screen, the countdown, Emily’s absence feels like an encroaching erasure; like she is becoming a missing thread in a sweater, pulled out from the hem. She will be an empty seat at the Monday meeting, an empty place at the microphone; a free parking spot on her street, an unoccupied desk at the courthouse. She will be gone, the way cloud people are gone, as if the world never held them. I think of Leo, out there in some schoolyard with no idea of the lurking threats, no mother to protect him. What I have is cloud logic, details with significance only if you’ve been in its fog.

  “Are you able to speak?” says the operator. “We’re tracing the call.”

  My eyes fall on the half-written message. Something I think I should—kind of a breakthrough—something you need to know. Cloud sickness teaches us, said Emily. Inside, said the documentarian, there is branching, possibility. Clarity comes, like a song, like Juni’s song. Tall pines. I am vomiting by the side of a road. Four lakes, I think. Four campsites. Between the swollen woman, and mother I became, I had been there. My thinking is clear, like song, like Juni’s song. I am in cloud, in its logic now. I will know how to find it.

  “I made a mistake,” I say. “Please forgive me.”

  I hang up and begin to drive. The neighbor woman is still screaming. The call is being traced. Let the cops run the procedural, I think. For now, I need to follow cloud.

  I’m in rapid-fire traffic. Taillights and lanes, a hand’s width between bumper and bumper. Morrissey Boulevard, two thirty. Channel 56 Ganett Corporation. IBEW. Ho Chi Minh on a water tower.

  Fugue state. My brain singing. In the missing middle, I had become a woman with eggs for eyes. My man, a girlish hand, had transformed into Apollo. In the trough of my existence, I had known one thing: it must remain hidden. But somehow, substitution logic, a thing slipping into another thing, my object, the shape and thickness of a penny, but with right angles, had been the wrong thing, numbers decaying on a screen. Somewhere else, some other person holds it. My part. Your part. I discard irrelevant data. The weeping pain, the cigarette butt releasing its last curl of smoke: these are details that belong to some other version, and so they must wait for later, for never. It is about one lake among four, Emily and the man, and the twenty-six hours I have to find them.

  Think. Think. Think.

  Driving has become impossible. I take the familiar exit and park in the afternoon shadows. I am a block from Independence House, can see some kind of commotion underway. Althea and Marisa are hanging out the window, trying to get a better view. I should go inside, tell the counselor what has occurred. It’s the likely action here, is the right and reasonable thing.

  But cloud pulls me, the sense of revelation just out of view. A point so traveled through, it became erased. Kif-Vesely’e. It had been other things, an informal refugee camp, a warehouse for imports, a summer camp, a bungalow colony. Me. I owed my good life to a promise I had sworn not to fulfill and, in the torn place between those two vows, I had gone to the lake shore. There was a faded bus ticket with my name on it. New York. Something County. My phone barely holds a charge, but I scroll through. Allegheny, Chautauqua, Dutchess, Herkimer.

  Think.

  At this hour, naptime is ending, Juni unsticking her thumb from the roof of her mouth, rolling over on her mat. The caregiver is laying out the graham crackers and apple juice for afternoon snack. Everything is still locked into normalcy. For the moment, all that is about to occur still lies before me. Slowly, the sleepy children assemble in front of the nursery door. In the enclosed breezeway which links the nursery to the yard, the caregiver appears with a clipboard. She turns and faces her duckling line of children. In this long minute, each breath sustained, each bird song slowed, Juni is still mine. I must go to her. I will go to her, soon.

  On the seat, as I have idled waiting for my phone to regain its charge, I have been pulling objects from my paperback, arranging them in a circle. Business card. Key card. Microchip. What was on the chip, code decaying on a screen, was not what the SUV man had wanted, but they need each other, the missing middle and the thing I had hidden in my paperback. The counter is over half a million. Sweet numbers being collected out of view. A hook being sunk into the fleshy secrets of individual lives. And these viewers, slack-jawed, mesmerized by some curious art, say yes, and yes, and yes. No crime has been committed. They have consented. But at some critical point, when the counter has reached its end, and the audience has reached capacity, my code could tug, reel them all in. It will not work alone, however. It needs its own medium, its own disguise. Half a million viewers are waiting on the missing middle and the man with the SUV is driving toward a blank space on a map to try to stop it. Data does not live in a physical location, not the way people do. It can be in two places at once, in a million. It can travel from Dakar to Roslindale in the space of a keystroke.

  All of this has been set in motion years ago. What if the Found Footage is poised on some server? What if it uploads the moment the counter runs out? Then, a bank account suddenly emptied, critical data erased, secrets made visible; what will the SUV driver do to the woman he believes has failed him then? Twenty-six hours remain.

  Think, Mellie.

  Then I am rifling through the book. Bar napkin. Dried flower from a bouquet. Juni drawing. Even the borrowing card which has remained in the pocket all these long years, names hatched darkly out, a new one inked in. I stop. Is it a name? Apollo, it says. Apollo Blue. Detail. Detritus. I shake my head and return the item to its pocket.

  Think, Mellie. Focus.

  The children emerge, Juni toddling on her own behind Marisa’s daughter. What does my slow heart say? There she is, her hair, and her soft belly and her baby Frankenstein lurch, each blessed and undeserved breath she draws in sweet. There is a way I should feel: I know. I know that a mother should know the color of her own baby’s eyes, whether they are brown or green or violet, but at this distance, in the sunshine, you cannot tell, and I cannot be sure. Moments have passed, no time at all; the shadows of the trees outside of Independence House haven’t moved.

  A cop car turns onto the cul-de-sac, slows as it approaches Independence House, the call being traced, the neighbor’s screams. A great bureaucratic system is grinding its gears into motion.

  Still, I could slip in. Still there is a heartbeat before it all begins. Later, when I contend with myself, I don’t want to make excuses. I have my chance. Outside my window, the children stand in a tidy line, awaiting instructions. The caregiver says something—green light—and they begin to run. There is order and safety there. Red light. They freeze instantly. Even Juni, Juni can understand these rules. As for me, I am safe for no one. I am no one who can be trusted.

  My phone lights up. I shift my wallet and, beneath, find the muddied bus ticket. Sullivan. Sullivan County. I run the search. Four lakes, the man had said, four campsites.

  Now, the cop car pulls into the Independence Drive. The women—my friends—lean out the window. The children look up from their game, expectant, and then I shift into drive. A spasm of longing seizes through me, but then I’m pulling onto the road. Something that occurs to me as I drive away: my therapist is going to be disappointed. If I get the chance, I’ll give her the consolatory news. Her work has been a success, in this at least: my memory is improving.

  Memory must be what tethers me, to this place and
the tiny girl I am leaving. There is a process, a protocol, and it is already underway. First, they will pull my intake sheet. Under emergency contacts, I’ve listed first Emily and then my mother. Emily’s phone is somewhere in the tall grass outside of my house and my mom’s number rings at an internet café twenty miles through the jungle from her hacienda. I have done all this math already, had read it in the original documents I signed when I checked in. From the beginning, a junkie calculates for the worst-case scenario, because when you’re a junkie, the worst case is eventually the case that comes to pass.

  Interim custody goes to the house. They will give her cheese on a plate and spaghetti with ketchup, and in twenty-four hours, she will get filtered into the system. Next, a social worker with a heavy caseload, and a baby who speaks unintelligible babble, a lingering bronchitis and terrific sorting skills, Juni will be put in with strangers, or in a nursery with five other babies, where no one will touch her for hours at a time. Still: none of that begins for twenty-four hours, which is one hour more than I have before Found Footage is meant to go live, and whatever the man who has become Apollo believes, whatever value Emily may seem to have to him, will end.

  I am thinking of the first time I left Juni at the sitter’s. Walking away was miraculous: like weightlessness on earth, or the power of invisibility. I thought: I’m utterly unrecognizable. I could be anyone again. No one can tell I’m a mother. But when I reached into my pocket, I found a teether, still cool from the freezer. The Juni drawing resting on my seat is a real one, snot green, with slashes of red. I fold it up, and return it to my paperback. There are parts of you, maybe, that embed so deeply, you cannot cast them off. That’s what I’m counting on.

  The sense of insight which has held me in place in the interval since Emily was taken has now unmasked itself. The migrainous aura, the thing detaching from the base of my spine, the fruiting onset of inspiration: I am about to become cloud sick. I tell myself there’s no such thing. But it’s like telling myself that there’s nothing to be afraid of when I’m alone on a dark street. Things do rise from the trash heaps.

  Now, in the waning light of my awareness, I consider the satellite photo which has come up on my phone. Sullivan County: green, sparsely populated, and freckled everywhere with blue. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies of water.

  Fourteen

  New York City

  1993

  I’m on the phone with Zarah who has mysteriously tracked me to the apartment on 109th, who had in fact been the first caller after I connected the line to the jack.

  “The future,” she says, “casts its shadows beforehand.”

  She continues to ring at strange hours. Paul and I are only up this early because West 125th begins shooting today. According to my friend the AD, relations between Westie and the brothers continue to be difficult, but I am rooting for the artist. She gave Paul the audition, then cast him in a small role. It’s all happened beyond my view—I’ve been in Queens collecting properties and set design elements, so I haven’t even glimpsed the difficult director, but I’m grateful to her all the same. Now, the morning of the first day of filming, Paul sits on the window, smoking and quizzing himself on his weird cues and I listen to Zarah.

  “You are trying to give away what is precious. In this instance, my readings say, there is no profit.”

  The AD has the same advice as Zarah.

  “Have you thought this through, Mellie?” he asked when I proposed the audition. “Because you’re going to earn maybe one consideration, all summer long. I mean including invites to openings, including letters of recommendation. Albert is just beginning to distinguish you from the five other PAs. Ansel still thinks your name is Marlie. Is this how you want to burn the favor, on this friend of yours? On this bizarre script?”

  On another note, I’ve been thinking about finances. An unexpected check in a strange denomination arrived from my mother yesterday: a hundred and thirty-six dollars. Beware the gift. I am waiting for it to clear. The check eases my mind, like a cool party I didn’t expect to be invited to.

  On another note, I’m getting fatter. I’ve put on at least five pounds since March break. Wanting cloud feels like being hungry and a thousand sugar calories consumed in the space of five minutes can sand the edge off. I think of Nancy, a phone call she’d made during the takeover. This was before she got kicked out of school and ran off to the farm. After a few days, they cut the phone line to the Dean’s office, but for a while, she was making free calls from his desk. She was fasting, she said. It was half-diet and half-protest. She was high off it, the hunger.

  “One of the guys they sent to represent the national organization is an alternate for the New York City ballet,” she said. “I made them put on some music, and we all had a kind of a party. Do you know what that means?” She was laughing, manic, days of living out of an academic office. “I’ve danced with the New York ballet after all.”

  I didn’t like her laughter. There was too much noise in it to read.

  “Are any of them sick?” I asked. “The people who are in there with you?”

  “Oh, Mellie. Everyone. Everyone is fucking dropping like flies.” The hunger is a point of continuity, Nancy in the Dean’s office, Andi fasting on the farm, the sick ballet dancer, and me, gorging myself. I shovel a turnover into my mouth. In my mind, Nancy’s thinness and ballet thinness and the thinness of viral death all blur now into a single threat I can’t comprehend.

  I try to be vigilant. Traveling up Broadway to Westie’s studio before dawn has fully broken seems a good way to dodge unwanted encounters. You have to love that about New York, that you can move five blocks and be in another world. But worlds also overlap. There is a handprint-shaped bruise on my shoulder which Paul refuses to notice. I don’t want to cross paths with Mr. Boyfriend for my own sake, but with Paul beside me it feels especially important. Sipping our coffee, eating our Hungarian pastries, I am alert for animated piles of rags, for monsters who rise up in shadowed doorways. The future casts its shadow beforehand.

  I stop Paul at the corner of 125th, like you do for a baby. The traffic is incongruously thick, coming around the construction at the exit from Henry Hudson. Paul is a bit dark below the eyes. I tilt his head back and try to dab on some foundation.

  “Mellie,” he says. “Seriously.”

  “You need to start to think of these things, Paul, develop your vanity. Show biz is not a merit system. It’s not about the quality of your soul in there.”

  “Lucky thing,” he says. He takes my wrist with one hand, then extracts the bottle of Visine from his messenger bag with the other and droppers his own eyeballs.

  I’m afraid for him. It’s one thing, at a cabaret. It’s another on screen. I think of the little-brother actor I’d read with in the audition. Men with personal trainers and highlights in their hair. That is the world he is moving into. And he doesn’t know yet how to use cover up. “And no cloud,” I say. “Not until after.”

  “You’re someone I fuck. Stop trying to mother me. I don’t respond to it.”

  “OK,” I say. “OK.”

  We take a few steps in silence while Paul blinks the tears out. “I’m nervous, Mellie.”

  “Well, it’s just an art film. It’s not Hollywood. The brothers got homeless people to act in one once.”

  “Terrific,” he says.

  I stop in front of the building. The block is momentarily empty, though I can feel the frenzy through the brick face. “We’re here.”

  Paul looks at me and I’m as surprised as anyone when he captures me in a kiss, and then bounds up the stairs. I can hear him ahead, introducing himself, transforming into someone charming and loveable and full of confidence. Into someone who knows how handsome he is. I don’t hold it against him, his having several selves. I have dozens; have been a Marshall scholar and a muffin slut, a thief and a clairvoyant and I am inventing new selves all the time, am who I am based on the audience exclusively.

  Someone I fuck. Even th
at is OK, will do, as long as it lasts. For Paul, I am liquid. I will be whoever will keep him. I think about my extra five pounds as I climb the stairs. I think about how no other girl has ever woken him like I do. I am happy to be exceptional in some way, the latest if not the last.

  Paul is talent, and even on a catch-can film set like Albert’s and Ansel’s, there’s a tradition of insulating the talent from the crew. A PA appears as we walk through the door and leads Paul off to some curtained area where hair and makeup will go to work on his number four buzz and his three lingering adolescent pimples. Another girl is running to The Bread Shop to get more coffee, more pastries. He is out of my orbit.

  The director, too, is talent, and the AD stands between her and the patter at the level of extension cords and what time the pizza will arrive, at the level of the blown fuse and the rising heat of the morning. They are calling her ‘Westie.’ She wears boys’ jeans slung around her hips with a worn leather belt, a wrinkled white button-down and a red lacy bit underneath. Her lipstick matches her bra. She weighs a hundred and five pounds, and probably a third of those are in her tits and her ass. She’s got a slash of dark hair across her forehead and is the kind of woman the boys I like actually go for. I look away, look at the artist again. I realize we’ve met, after a fashion.

  “Westie wants—” says the AD. “Westie needs you to . . .”

  Which explains why I didn’t know what was coming, why I didn’t foresee it. Because I’d encountered her years before as Valerie Weston, an artist who worked in the medium of wax rather than film, whom I’d last seen sobbing behind closing elevator doors. She still smokes, I observe. She’s still threateningly gorgeous.

  “What?” I ask the AD.

  “Westie needs the room to be cooler. We need all of you guys to go get your fans from your rooms. Can you get the PAs on the windows?”

  He’s displeased with me, but I am not attending to the AD anymore because Westie—Valerie Weston—has seen me, and is now walking across the studio in my direction. She recognizes me, and she is not smiling.