The man says something. “Where they quarry it,” I think, but maybe it’s “incendario.” And then I realize there is a gap in the rock face ahead. An opening. Behind me, the man has retreated. The disorienting sense of the ocean below me returns, growing louder and more distinct as I step across the threshold into the cave-like fissure in the stone.
It smells of wood smoke within, and of creatures. Something—a syringe—cracks beneath my feet. Then, ahead, in a shaft of light, I make out a figure hunched under a blanket. Shadows the color of bruises or bruises as big as shadows darken his exposed skin, and he holds himself bent in a way that suggests deep damage in intimate places, organs and worse. It is more terrible, I think, because of the size of him. He is so big, he should be invincible, but he’s been hurt, and not just once, and not just by one person. The pain seems to shimmer off him, but as I draw nearer, I see that his shimmer is physiological, is a kind of tremor or spasm. Twenty feet away, I stop.
His back is toward me, and he wears a head set.
He is speaking indistinctly. “I can go anywhere,” he says. “Here is the point where everything passes through.”
“Paul,” I call. “Paul.” He is maybe twenty feet away from me now, rocking a little bit. Some dirt or loose rocks scatter before him, and I hear them plummet. This is when I realize the source of the ocean sound. As I’ve followed the twist of the passageway, I have again approached the ocean, and now I see that we’re on some sort of promontory, and there, not far from his feet, the rocks open again onto a cliff. “Paul, it’s me.”
“Hey, lady,” he says. He taps his headset. “You have to put yours on. Otherwise you can’t hear it.”
I put the headset on. The warmth enters my temples, but I don’t feel compelled by it. There’s nothing different here from a waning cloud high, and since that’s where I’m at, the feeling is hardly magic. “What am I listening for?”
“How about a joke? It’s not that funny. You OK with that?”
“Sure,” I say. “OK. Go ahead.”
“So there’s this guy, right? And he’s in love with a horse. Crazy about this horse. He tries everything. Love songs, gifts. People tell him, that’s a horse. A horse can’t love you, but he won’t listen. He’s like, nope. If I love this horse hard enough, someday, it’s gonna love me in return. I love you, he screams at the horse. But the horse doesn’t say anything. After years and years, he dies still pleading with the horse.”
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s not a funny joke.”
“Wait,” he says. “That’s not the punchline. It’s the guy’s funeral. Everyone’s crying around the gravesite, flowers, hymns, all that shit, and then the horse wanders up wearing a widow’s veil. People are like, how dare you show your face? And the horse goes, Lo siento. No hablo ingles.”
“Paul,” I say. I’ve edged forward, am maybe fifteen feet away. The headset feels uncomfortable against my skin. “We can take time. You can explain it to me.”
There’s some place I’ve missed along the way, failed to look at properly. We can walk back, take eons to talk it through. Nothing and no one will press on us. We will reassess each terrible betrayal, calculate the damages to the fraction of a cent; there can be payouts and generous compensation packages. There can be reparations.
“It’s not too late,” I say. “We can be new.”
He coughs, or is it a pained laugh? “Is that so, lady? So how come I still smell it on you?”
“It was just a little bit,” I tell him, slipping a little as I move closer. I right myself. “I do it all the time; I can handle it.”
“Your way keeps looping around, back again. Different animal at the gravesite. Different way to die.”
“I’m the horse?” I say. “I thought I was the man.”
“Oh, now,” he says. “Oh, now. Lady. Honey. That’s the point. You’re not the widow; you’re not giving advice; you’re not the man and you’re not the fucking saddle. The joke is not about you.”
“This is the great wisdom the man in the cave has for me? That I’m selfish?”
“It’s not my wisdom,” he says. “I’m just a grunt.” He taps the headset again. “Listen.”
I try to listen. The sounds of the world are louder, the sea below, the moist drip of the cave. I remember the yearning song, the familiar voice, the strange heat I’d felt when I’d worn the stones before. But the stones have gone cold.
“Everything is in there,” he says, “but you can’t receive it. You aren’t getting any of it. You’ve put too much other junk inside you. The end is coming in on a live feed, but you can’t even hear it.”
“What did I do?” I ask. “What should I do?”
“Time’s up,” he says. “Do you know yet?” He takes a little step.
“It’s a question,” I say, stalling as I lurch forward. “You want to ask me a question.”
He shakes his head.
“I’m supposed to give you something. There’s something I have, that you want.”
“That’s closer. You’re on the right track.” He lets out another little cough and steps forward toward the cliff edge. I’ve come within touching distance, but even in the moonlight, his face is still shrouded.
“I can give it to you,” I say. “Whatever you need. We still have enough,” but it’s a lie, because anyone who uses knows that loving someone on cloud is like drunk driving. It is good enough, it is always good enough, until you smash yourselves to bits.
His feet kick at the earth, and a handful of rocks skitter forward toward the edge, followed by a long disappearing sequence of pings. The sound of the sea swallows it.
“Christ,” I say. “Step back from there. You’re pretty close to the edge.”
“Last chance,” he says. “Which way are we going to exit?”
“Happily ever after,” I say. “A baby. Our baby.”
He pauses, as if considering it, chin down. If he would just look up. If he would just see me. But then, his body makes a little jolt of dismissal. “I’m not too sure I work that way anymore, lady honey.”
He takes just one step. There is a version of this story which is perfect, in which he falls. He plummets down. It is the completion of the fall he’s been making his whole life, slipping on Nancy’s roof in the middle of the winter, arcing from the train on a clear artic day, his hands releasing from the chain link onto the furry rock below, or under Lew’s blows.
But instead, I pull him back. I have him, skin and meat and bone and ache. He is in my arms. I pull him toward me, turning his face toward my face. “Paul,” I say.
The man before me is gray. His skin has the peculiar puffinesss and pallor of a longtime-user. Otherwise, he is blank. I cannot see his face.
“What have you done to yourself?” I say. “Oh, G-d. What have I done?”
“Now she gets it,” he says. “Here’s the punchline. Paul’s already gone.”
I remember reaching the edge of the cliff. Dawn had come. It was not a lovely view. The camp people had dumped carts and trash bags full of diapers and husks of squash and bright aluminum cans over the edge, and the objects caught in tenacious cacti that clung to the slope, caught in the matted brush. I could see a path, such as a falling body might cut as it made its way to the rocks below. A gray blanket moved slightly in the wind, but there was nothing beneath it. I picked up a handful of rocks and put them in my mouth.
Now, someone comes to stand beside me. She puts an arm over my shoulder.
“What do you need?” she asks. “How can I help?”
“I’ve lost something,” I say. My chest aches. My ribs feel like they’ve been cracked open. “But I can’t recall what it is.”
“Do you want me to help you remember?”
I shake my head. “I want to be better,” I say. “I want to figure out a way to feel better.”
She pulls me into her, her free hand straying to my belly. “I think you can. I really think you can, but it’s not going to be quick or easy. Real stuff never is.”
Eight
Sullivan County
2010
I want my story to be that I got off cloud with an epiphany. I had a growing child inside me, and she changed me. But that is not what happened. The hospital detoxed me, because I was asleep most of the time and because I was incapacitated so the incoherent time during which I would have sawn off my arm for more cloud I was prevented from doing it. When I was released into Trudi’s care, I allowed her to feed me sleeping pills which were not authorized by the obstetrician. I took the bottle with me when she put me on the bus east to dull the trembling and the hunger that would still arise. Even so I had between five and twenty relapses, depending on whether you counted the episodes as distinct, or as sustained benders. I ate cloud while I was pregnant. I ate cloud while I nursed. I was so high one night, I dropped my baby on the stairs and she bled because of my negligence. I would get clean, and then I would eat again. It wasn’t easy, and I didn’t do it right, but I have two months sober, and I am headed home. I wish I had more to bring to the fight that lies ahead.
It is Monday morning and I am on a bus again, making the journey back to Boston. The burns on my hands are salved with a particularly rich-smelling ointment, and the bandages themselves are made of torn cotton towel. My purse is gone—ID, cash, and also my paperback. The borrower’s card I discovered in my pocket when I shed my clothes to shower and treat my wounds. On the reverse of the card I can read Paul’s name still, and I think I will hang onto it, this one scrap. If I can make my way back to Juni, I will need to figure out what kind of story to tell her about this person, and I know the boy with the library book who found me in the woods is the best part of it.
I thrust my hand into the fire, and I held it there, flames leaping up my sleeves. Trudi lifted her weapon behind me. The plastic casing on the tiny chip bubbled and melted—the thing was gone. Trudi shot again. I felt the bullet shoot by me and then there was no sound, only the throb of the bang. Deafened, I waved my arm wildly, and Trudi leapt away from the flames. I fell to the ground, rolling toward the window. Pain sparked through me. The fire jumped from my arm to the nest of bedding in the corner. I beat my arm against my body, and the flame leapt, like something alive. By now, the bedding had caught, and spread to a stage curtain pulled to one side of the room. Trudi took another shot, and now I was throwing myself against the glass of the window. It shattered, the glass driving into me and I leapt. Bleeding, I ran for the nearest shelter—there was a shed—and I managed to get myself inside of it before Trudi and Lew emerged.
The structure was old and the plywood siding had warped away in a corner, and it afforded me a partial view of what was still unfolding outside. The fire had not been contained. Smoke was leaking from the broken window panes. Trudi and Lew stopped and scanned the landscape. Just as they turned toward my hidden position, someone leaned on a horn. Trudi raised her weapon and pointed it toward the site of the car crash, and shot again before Lew unexpectedly reached out and restrained her weapon hand. Of the two of them, he still must have had the better hearing because he’d heard the approaching fire engines. Then, with barely another moment’s hesitation, they made for the rental sedan. By the time the trucks arrived, both the SUV and the rented white sedan had escaped.
What I thought when I emerged from the shed: this is the sunburn hour, when good mothers slather their infants in sunscreen, pull hats over their tender scalps. Juni was no longer an infant, had at last a head of wispy hair, but who would protect her skin? Who would be there, for whom would the day’s heat spark the instinct to cover her? There was room for very little else in my mind but going forward. The first of the fire trucks arrived, and I began to wave.
I like to think Paul had leaned on the horn on purpose to draw my pursuers’ attention away from me. If that’s so, then maybe it’s less disconcerting that he has the only record I’ve kept of our life together. It feels strange to have it gone. But I know, I understand, that that man and I don’t owe each other anything anymore.
I was sitting in the cab of the fire truck, headed back for the fancy resort town where the bus station was, when I asked to borrow one of the firefighters’ phones. The countdown on the page for Bright Big Future had run out, and the links, one of the links when I tried to click through, was already broken. We’d paid our debts to each other, and what happened after wasn’t something I was going to get to know.
But what of Juni? What of what she deserves? A better mother, a stronger one. But as it happens, she has only me. There will be for her still those moments when she will show her true face. Here I am, she will say. Even if all I have inside me is a lump, I will have to be there then.
Anyway, the fire department’s medic cleaned me up and put me in one of the Sullivan County FD t-shirts. The burns, though painful, ran only to mild blistering on my hand and arm. The cuts from my leap through the window were worse, but their guy had picked out the glass, and the bleeding had stopped.
“You sure you don’t want to ride in the ambulance?” the firefighter asked me again.
“I have someone there who can help me,” I said, showing him the address on the device.
“Family?” he said.
“Yeah,” I told him, which turned out to be true.
“Hi,” said the counter-girl, “welcome to OneLife.” She wore a nose piercing and a stack of leather bracelets. She’d had some reconstructive surgery: there were delicate scars at her hairline and nose, but the work was excellent and you hardly would have known.
I gave her my name, and she typed it into the computer. The girl betrayed barely a flicker of surprise at my bloodshot eyes, my oversized shirt, the medic’s bandages which had begun to soak through. Behind her, there was a little altar set with cacti and succulents, a photograph of Nancy. She stared straight at the camera; her little tummy and her big tits undisguised by posture or trickery, daring you to call bullshit. At these places, they treat her with the reverence usually reserved for the sainted or the dead, though Nancy is apparently neither. It is said, among her adherents, that she has ‘gone into retreat,’ which is code for an unresolved financial matter which makes Mexico friendlier territory for the moment.
With a muted beep, the computer returned my file and whatever my status, it impressed.
“Oh,” sighed the girl, her skin coloring, the scars darkening momentarily with the blush. “You’re a level twelve.”
I used to think it was tits, the difference between Nancy and me, but you could also call it grace. Something leapt her from one way of being to another, some spark; Nancy would probably have it that it was something in those stones. Me, the only thing that ever really felt like a leap was cloud. Maybe the problem was in a mindset. Fundamentally, I am a New Englander. I expect to pay for my sins eventually, even if cloud let me flee for longer than most. But Nancy could allow for a concept of total rehabilitation, somewhere between therapy and redemption. Nancy was committed to the radically humane idea that even your worst mistakes, you might not have to be punished for.
Me, standing at the OneLife counter: I’d been crawling for so long, and I was trying to crawl still, but the way seemed unclear. I didn’t need grace or saving, but I needed something, a little shock to push me in whatever direction I needed to go and I was ready to call down a bit of secular magic. I was ready to do something Emily might call praying, if it got me there.
“It says in your preferences you usually do a video session?” The girl asked.
“That’s right,” I answered. “And if I could, I’d love to borrow a scissors.”
She led me to my private pod. At the entrance, she cast me a furtive look. “Did you know her? Like, personally?” she asked. “She inspired me in more ways, you know? Anyway, sorry—” she consulted her device. “I’ll patch you through as soon as we get someone on the line. It’s our busy season. I’m afraid we might not have a fully certified—oh, oh, wow. You’re in for a real treat.” She smiled again, then opened the ionizer cabinet next to my private cu
bby. “Here’s your stone set, whenever you feel primed for enversion.”
“That’s new,” I said. Rather than a headset, the stones were attached to a slender cord, like a necklace.
“We stopped using the temple stones; they reminded people too much of earbuds, too much of a form of distraction. May I?”
I had already climbed inside my cubby, but I leaned my head out again and allowed her to place the cord around my neck. The stones fell right on Juni’s spot at my breast bone. There was a pleasant sensation, if only slight, when the warm stones touched. Maybe, even there was some kind of pulse which entered me, which didn’t convert me; the entire ritual was complete horseshit.
The pull-down mirror reflected back my frazzled hair and the deep hollows of sleeplessness and grief below my eyes, the beige stones at my chest. Then, the screen descended in front of it and played the introductory video about the glory of OneLife.
They did good work, I had to admit, along with all of their crackpot self-improvement. The primary pillar of OneLife tells us that no benefit can come to a person which does not also visit another. OneLife was at the women’s shelter, and the Center for Exploited Children, and the Organization against Human Trafficking.
I clicked through.
Nancy had invented a vehicle for impelling rich people to help poor people. A place like OneLife doesn’t list prices, but a rough estimate told me that to reach the private pod level would cost approximately $50,000.00. To some extent, the fees redistribute wealth, if for no one other than the cute counter girls who bear the marks of their rough adolescences. I know this has always kind of been Nancy’s life goal: to take country club money and transform it into health advocacy for Latin American sex workers. Still, it has to be said that this is an imperfect mechanism. There are hairdressers running up credit cards at these places; there are people like Judah, who think a stone can soak the past out of them, can free them from what they must carry.
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