You Again

by Debra Jo Immergut

  To: Tristane.Kazemy@montrealneuro.ca

  Dr. Kazemy, I understand that we will be meeting soon in New York, and that we are somewhat at odds in our analysis of the Willard case. Quantum physicists are accustomed to having to win people over to our views—and given the evidence, I firmly believe that we are not simply dealing with the illusions of a broken brain. But for now, I humbly offer Susskind’s admonition: those who ignore the implications of good evidence are simply averting their eyes from a vision they find overwhelming.

  With regards,

  Garrett P. Shuttlesworth, MS, PhD

  Michael James Chair in Theoretical Physics,

  Humboldt State University, Arcata, CA

  ABBY, OCTOBER 3, 2015

  I drove to the Petimezas house. Dark windows, a few rain-soaked newspapers littering the concrete steps at the feet of its half-clothed statues. I asked at school. Elizabeth Vong shook her head. His parents had pulled Dmitri out, she told me, apparently the family had moved back to Europe. “Some kind of job change,” she said, “it was all very rushed.” She lowered her voice. “The boy was bright but a bit of a handful.”

  I journeyed to the Brigade’s meeting place in the far eastern reaches. Locked. I rattled the chain, pounded the door, but nothing stirred inside. A rustling in the trash pile made me flee.

  Pete told me he didn’t know where Dmitri had disappeared to. “Lately he was more your friend than mine,” he said.

  He’d plunged back into the screens, curled in the carapace of his room, which, a month after our return, still seemed a provisional place, his clothes piled in a corner, the walls bare. He refused all attempts at refurnishing it. He allowed only an air mattress, and he stationed himself upon it, back propped against the wall and sheets twisted at his feet, eyes fixed on his laptop.

  So here again was silent Pete, reluctant and stymied. I studied his face for signs of an opening. There were no such signs. Just a stubble I hadn’t noticed before. His beard was coming in.

  Dennis emerged relatively unscathed—bodily. Abrasions on his hands and face, and lung inflammation from the superheated solvent fumes. The EMT said he’d have died too, if he hadn’t been on the lucky side of Mariah’s behemoth SUV at the key moment, and so shielded from the worst of the blast wave and the shrapnel. Still, the doctors told me to be alert for symptoms of concussion or ear damage. I tried to be alert. I could detect no symptoms. But he’d vanished into his studio in the days that followed. The Viennarte show was just over three months away, mid-January, and he’d need time to pack and ship his weighty pieces. He spent hours shearing, grinding, welding in a cloak of noise. I assumed. I didn’t venture there. When home, he, like his son, was mostly silent. Raking at the wet rug of leaves in the backyard. Making toast for the boys’ breakfast and burning it. I thought he might still be in shock. Or maybe he was just doing what I was. Trying to discover what to say, and how to comprehend.

  For example, how was I to understand the fact that German Pizziali had appeared on the scene the night Mariah died?

  First, a wavering aurora borealis of red and blue, as reflected in the dark wet street. Three police cars, then more, then a blocky train of fire engines and ambulances, zigzagging down the street. Farther back, a more diffuse white glaring light burst forth suddenly, bouncing off the mist, illuminating the scene for television cameras.

  The antifa soldiers fled in the wake of the explosion, of course, scattered into the night before the air even cleared. Many of the party guests did too. Panicked and fearful that some larger violent act or cataclysm had been set in motion. Pete and I were left standing there, along with a handful of guests, who seemed stapled in place by horror. Transfixed by the shattering truth. Mariah Glücksberg was dead.

  My friend Mariah. My foe? Foamy and pink tissue tangled in her blood-wet hair. Jillian Broder had been the first to rush to her, the fire was still burning, another explosion seemed likely. Jillian dove over Mariah, her silvery suit instantly slicked with crimson. She and Dennis dragged Mariah’s body onto the sidewalk, away from the fuming, fulminating bottles and cans in the garage. Turpentine. Thinners and oil-paint solvents. The firemen had cleared everyone to the far side of the street and aimed their hoses at the smoking pile. Now the volatile fluids were dispersed, inert.

  Mariah lay under a black vinyl shroud. More blood puddled on the sidewalk beside it, developing a patent-leather sheen. Many uniformed people milled around this small dark mound, in and out of the illuminated garage, up and down the stoop of the carriage house. The front doors were thrown wide open, spilling music, some endlessly looping playlist of Biggie Smalls, into the street.

  Dennis, on a gurney, being bandaged by an EMT, regarded us in a daze. “Why was Pete at the party?” he kept asking.

  A stout, round-shouldered man in a beige windbreaker ambled up, as if he’d just been out for a stroll in the damp night air. “What a terrible thing,” he said, nodding at each of us. Then he directed his small, misaligned eyes at Pete. “Kids shouldn’t play with matches, am I right?”

  Pete looked down at his feet and said nothing.

  “He was taking part in a peaceful protest,” I said. “I think that’s what most of the kids intended. I don’t even understand how this happened.”

  “Fire chief says it looks like some of those cans of flammables were pretty rusted. So a piddly little firework breaks the window, a couple of sparks fly in, and then, ignition, blast-off.”

  Now the EMT began wheeling Dennis toward the ambulance. They would need to check him more thoroughly at the hospital. “Mariah was a friend, we both loved her,” I said.

  The cop nodded. “I think I get the picture, Mrs. Willard.”

  I glared at him. “And this was just young people trying to be heard. What happened was a tragic accident.”

  His imprecise gaze seemed to focus precisely now. On me. “Just excitable kiddies. Could be. With all the valuables inside, the homeowner had exterior cameras, of course. We’ll review. See what we see.” Then he turned to Pete. “You better keep your mind on your books, son,” he said. “Your get-outta-jail-free passes are all used up.”

  ABBY, OCTOBER 8, 2015

  In the morning, Benjamin was in tears. “Wowza is gone,” he said. “He hasn’t shown up for his breakfast and I can’t find him anywhere.”

  Dennis looked up from his bowl of soggy untouched cornflakes. He wasn’t eating much these days. His eyes were red-rimmed and dim.

  “Let’s go get him back,” he said.

  We split up, Dennis heading down the slope, Benjamin and I heading up. “Wowza. Wowza,” we called, up and down the block. We searched behind the neighbor’s trash cans and under cars. “Do you think he’s gone forever?” Ben asked. His brows troubled, wrinkled. I pulled him to me, kissed his forehead. “I don’t know if anything is ever gone forever.”

  At Fourth Avenue, he angled south and I turned north. Parents shepherded little ones toward the day care center. Bike commuters whizzed by. Schoolgirls in hijabs. Nowhere did I glimpse a cardboard-colored cat.

  Up ahead by the curb, next to a construction dumpster, I noticed a grease-spattered old oven on the curb, its door hanging askew on busted hinges. If I were a cat, I’d hide in there, I thought. I pulled the door, causing the metal to yelp. I peered into the dark cavern of the stove, and then I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  “Hey there, Abigail.”

  I straightened slowly and turned. “You’re supposed to solve mysteries,” I said, feigning cool. “Where’s my son’s cat?”

  “That’s not on my docket,” he said. “But I’d try the fish store down the block.” He folded his arms, in his fine camel-hair jacket, as he deployed that dimple. “Now maybe you can tell me where to find Milo Petimezas.” He nodded toward a black sedan, clearly an unmarked police car, parked at the curb. “Just sit and have a chat with me, Abby, please. Just a chat.”

  In the car, he switched off the squawking scanner and turned to me. “Deep shit. I am doing what I can to keep P
ete’s name out of it,” he said. “This group he was mixing with has all the wrong friends. The heaviest of connections. I’m hoping he didn’t know. And you didn’t.”

  “Heavy connections?”

  “What did you know about the Petimezas family?”

  “Not a thing,” I said. “Their kid goes to my kids’ school. That’s it.”

  “Abby, have you joined the antifa, for chrissake?”

  Something in his tone suddenly awakened my anger. “I was a guest at that party. And Pete hasn’t broken any laws.”

  “I know,” he said. “But how did this unfold? You’re a woman with responsibilities.”

  “And you’re a man who fucks around with such a woman, with nothing in mind but what he can grab for himself.”

  This landed. He sighed and cast his eyes down. “Not entirely false, not entirely true,” he said. But then he hardened again. “Look. All I want to know is, where the fuck is Milo Petimezas, and how does a family that trades in drugs and weapons come to be stealing paintings from Mariah Glücksburg?”

  Paintings? I couldn’t really take this information in. “The whole family? Illegal arms dealers?”

  “Dear old grandad did his first prison stint in 1964. I’ve arrested Milo three times myself, Abby.”

  Pete giving Dmitri a tour of the carriage house, his remarks on the old painting of the erstwhile prince of Greece.

  The man on the stairs, the leather sneakers. Wasn’t that Milo Petimezas?

  “And you understand, how the paintings were lifted, that was not a job by some green kid. Pro tools and technique, fast work. Cut out of the frames. Five of her splatters—you’re talking probably eight, ten million right there, correct? Plus old pictures, family portraits.”

  “They stole all that?”

  “Your antifa commotion was great, noisy cover for a thief.”

  “But Dmitri seemed to be a true believer,” I said.

  “Yes, and apparently the Petimezas clan fought in the Greek resistance to the Nazis, and a few were strung up by the right-wingers during the war. But here, they’re thugs. I’m thinking they involved their little one in the life, when it suited them.”

  “But Pete—he didn’t know a thing. He really is a true believer.” My voice was shaking. I didn’t want to cry. “Anyhow, what the hell are you doing here? Are you following me?”

  He shrugged. “I had business in the neighborhood. Listen, I’ll do what I can for Pete. And you. I’m sick of slogging it out in the barnyard, Abby. This case is my ticket. I’ve just got to steer Pizziali the fuck away from it, and if I bring in Milo and his folks, that deputy commissioner slot is mine. You could help me bust these scumbags.”

  I heard Dennis’s voice then, drifting into the open window. “Wowza!”

  “This is why you fucked me.”

  “Abigail.” He reached for my arm. I yanked it away.

  “Do your job. But stop following me.” I slid quickly out of the car and hurried toward the sound of my husband’s voice. I looked over my shoulder once to see the sedan slowly moving away.

  I spotted Dennis down the cross street, peering into shrubs and up into trees. Then I notice a girl walking up behind him. Pink coat. Messy hank of curls. In her arms, a brown bundle of fuzz, a tail draped over her arm, flicking this way and that.

  She crosses the sidewalk toward Dennis.

  I watch him reach out for the bundle. I see her smile at him. I see him smile at her and say a few words. She laughs and nods and relinquishes the cat and then he is moving toward me, he has seen me, and behind him, she glimmers away straight into the still-low morning sun.

  “A lovely young woman saved the day,” Dennis reported, as he handed the wanderer to Benjamin back at the house. “It gives you some hope, a thing like that,” he said. He turned and put his hand on my face. “A thing like that,” he said.

  ABBY, OCTOBER 20, 2015

  The human brain is 73 percent water, a saturated sponge sloshing around in a brimming bucket. “Such liquid makes it so nice to penetrate with the lovely radio waves of the MRI,” said Dr. Alvarado, the fancy new neurologist who’d been sourced by Dennis via Mariah and her uptown connections. “So the waves will help us make a very fine map, and we will try to see then why you are feeling woozy and falling down.” She spoke with the lilt of Chile or Argentina. Her lashes were thickly mascaraed, so they resembled many exclamation points, and her big eyes looked sad. She assured me all would be well. “No caffeine, no jewelry, no zippers on your clothes. Be very comfy because we will have you prone and still for quite a while.”

  The scan was scheduled for six days hence. Six days hence, they’ll roll me into the tube of their great magnetized machine, and my every watery molecule will sway to its urgings, just as waves surrender to the pull of the moon.

  ABBY, OCTOBER 26, 2015

  In my arm, a shot of dye (“gadolinium, to give us a pretty contrast,” said Dr. Alvarado). On my head, a snap-on plastic helmet (“It’s called a coil, or, if you prefer, a robot hat”). Then a pair of headphones, burbling Bach cantatas, and a slow slide into the brilliant cylinder. Beyond the Bach, still I heard the muffled thumping, rattling, pounding, the percussive sound of the machine, doing its magic, mapping the saturated sponge. Mapping the clump of cells that adds up to Abigail.

  I studied the patterns of veins in pink, the inside of my eyelids, which were blasted into translucence by the glare. I’d never seen this pattern in my whole life, even though my eyes and these lids were such intimate companions, I realized with druggy wonder. They’d dosed me with some sedative, “a gentle relaxing will happen and this will keep you resting in peace,” said Dr. Alvarado. Her English idioms could use a bit of tweaking.

  I don’t remember much, except that at one point, wandering crooked lines across pink landscape, I saw A. Strobing lights, hammering beats. Was she dancing? Her strange, sinuous movements. Was she in that club, the one I’d spotted her exiting, at the start of this unfathomable year?

  A curious vision. The velvet coat, the silver shoes, gliding across the pink.

  Am I dreaming? Tripping?

  No. I am remembering.

  Up the battered stairs on West Twelfth Street. Up into the apartment, the shoes kicked off, the coat flung over a chair. Eli Hammond outside on the balcony, in yellow glow. He is flicking his lighter.

  He has taken the portfolio she is preparing to send off to RISD. Sketches, slides, written explanations, slowly and painfully composed.

  Don’t.

  He has the fire in his hands, he is bent over the ash bucket. His hands are shaking. She sees the glass pipe, broken on the concrete.

  Don’t you dare, she says. She runs at him. Her hands reaching for it, the portfolio. The many color studies, the pencil and charcoal drawings done in cafés and bars, the atrium in Midtown, the diner on the corner over a breakfast of eggs and toast. The sketch of him, even, from the day they met in MoMA.

  And one she has finished only this morning: a portrait in india ink, the head of a woman, not old and not young, wistfulness in her dark eyes, strength in the set of her mouth.

  All of this. Tucked into a stamped and addressed manila envelope that he has singed with his desperate flame.

  He pushes her away, hard, and then she falls hard. But she hauls herself up again, scrabbling for that portfolio, which now seems the only thing to live for. And she lunges for the envelope, and he lets it slip to the floor and grabs her instead, clutching her with terrible force. She looks up into his face in astonishment, meets his dark blue eyes rimmed with paler blue and she catches the very moment he chooses death over whatever would otherwise happen next. His body looms, he has her in a lock, clenches her tight, and the blues have gone flat and his beautiful hands, which she has sketched, which she has kissed, and had all over her and inside her—now they grip her upper arms like iron bands and he backs her against the railing, trying to lift her up and over it. She kicks at him. His bony body presses the length of her, he is thin with the poison h
e smokes and weaker than he should be but he is too heavy, and he tries to push her over the edge but she wraps her strong legs around him as she has so many times in love, fusing her body to his, and then a great cracking happens at her back as the old balcony railing gives way.

  Falling from yellow light to black and silence.

  The portfolio somehow lands in Providence. How?

  And then Dr. Alvarado is there, and Dennis too. He is holding my hand and gazing into my face with concern. Each line and wrinkle, his ruffled wheat-silver hair falling over his deeply familiar gaze, his lashes lighter at their tips, the soft jawline and the feel of his hand, which I know as if it were a piece of my own body. All of these are guideposts back into the world of my world. Where I will and must and desire to live.

  “I don’t rule anything out, but I am pleased with what I see,” said Dr. Alvarado. “We will read more closely and call with final results. But for now, Abigail, the scans look clean.”

  Clean.

  The world where I desire to live. I just had to turn back to it. Later in bed, determined to relish this clean and happy result, I turned to Dennis. His fingers seemed to retain some heat from his work, from the fiery torch, as he slid them over me, forearms, small of my back, thighs. My mind retained a trippy residue that transformed his familiar touch into something otherworldly, made him into yet another visiting spirit. Yes, we do know each other’s every curve and hollow but that doesn’t mean we don’t still surprise each other, and this night we did.

  Dr. Tristane Kazemy, OCTOBER 31, 2016

  Balcony railing collapse. Diffuse axonal head wound.

  Written right there, in the additional records from New York. Old medical records showing that yes, she had been critically injured in a fall, and she had survived. Luck. And she’d healed well. Youth. No lingering effects noted. In fact, as Laurin would be glad to point out, the wound was almost invisible, just a void in the scans made last year.

  But this void.

  She needed to start writing her report for the New York meeting—still she sat here, hunched past midnight in her cubicle at the deserted lab, reading the woman’s words instead.