The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  She said, “Thou art much taken with thoughts of death.”

  He looked at her then. He was real and hostile. He had pinched up more rushes; now he crushed them in his fingers. His hand closed into a fist.

  He said, “I would be remembered, madam. Perhaps thou canst say how I will be remembered?”

  “How thou wilt be remembered?”

  “Make not thy puzzling faces. Thou knowest.”

  She said, and her voice was hoarse, “I cannot tell what ails thee, sir.”

  “Canst thou not? Then I must give thee another story for thy book of secrets. Know, then, that I was once as thou art. I have been such a Jew, whose sleep was waking. I have walked in the skin of a stranger and conversed with the dead. I have lived another life in the dark.”

  Then all shifted and appeared in a different pattern. They were a deep well, apart from all the world, and she knew. He had chosen and pursued her because they were the same. He was real to her because they were the same. He had once traveled in his dreams to a different time; he had lived another life in sleep. There were others like her. Of course there were. How had she ever thought there would not be?

  And she would have spoken honestly then—made certain what he meant, made him say where in time he went—but his body was tense and hostile. And she didn’t want to be a madwoman here. She was a madwoman there, and she wanted to be safe somewhere. If she told him of his future, she had no good news. He was only a man, as fallible as all men were. He was nothing to trust.

  He watched her think all this, and when she looked away without answering him, he sighed. He said, “We are agreed I am thy dream. Now I shall tell you a dream of mine, that thou mayest know me for thine own. For I trust thou hast seen this vision. Methinks, ’tis a goblin all our dark folk see.

  “So, as I slept, I saw a dead city, a city such as never has been in the world. ’Twas wondrous high; the brows of its roofs touched the misty clouds. Its walls were wrought of coals and ice, and its earth was unnatural stone, where no beast lived. In that place were no forests, no healthful meadows. No birds; all the vasty air was dead. The dirty beetles had perished, and their paper armor drifted in the streets. ’Twas a kingdom of naught, of winds and silence.”

  She was looking at the fire, and saw it there. It was the same evil city she’d seen before, its towers aglitter with dirt and ice. It was seething in her head. It was a noise that wasn’t noise, as if a wind blew mutteringly, vilely, in her head.

  He said, “But this dream is thine also, madam. Is this dream not thine?”

  Emilia shuddered, and the vision was gone. She was looking into Will’s eyes, though she couldn’t see his eyes in this light. She couldn’t tell what was real.

  “My lord,” she said, “are we then met for the saving of the world?”

  She touched his hand but he didn’t respond. His hand was stiff. It trembled.

  “Speak not of the world,” he said. “It is a crow to pick mine eyes.”

  “A crow?”

  “Nay, tell me what thou knowest of me. Tell me what thou knowest or be damned.”

  Then the dream flickered. The fire grew huge, ringed by its grotesques. She was gripping his hand while the fire tried to blow her away. Will talked somewhere; he was raging while Emilia was afraid and couldn’t breathe. The fire was cold and pleasant like a bed. He would die in four months, and she hadn’t tried to help. She had made the wrong choice, missed the obvious move. She deserved his hate. She was a fool.

  When the dream came back, he was gentle. He stroked her palm; he let her lie in his bosom. She lay there, weak, and watched the fire grow dim. And he sang in a low voice, lost in the tall room, sang “Tom o’Bedlam” that was (she thought) the voice of his outraged heart:

  From the hag and hungry goblin

  That into rags would rend ye

  The spirit that stands by the naked man

  In the Book of Moons defend ye

  And when the song was done, she said, “What I know … Go not to London in this year. For if thou goest to London, thou shalt die.”

  She woke next to Ben. It was hot and gray; a sallow half-light spread from the curtainless window. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t recognize the room. For a while, she lay and breathed and supposed that all the world she had known was gone.

  Gradually, it came back to her: Martin’s house and Qued and the slow hot summer. The curtains were gone, but everything else was the same. She crept out of bed, leaving Ben asleep, and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. She was Kate. She was the same. She put her hand to the mirror and the glass was normal. The shower curtain with the dolphin pattern was the same. The air she breathed was air. The same.

  Then she went to the window and saw the street.

  17

  She went to a psychiatrist. She went to a neurologist. She got three different scans. She spent a night in a sleep clinic with electrodes pasted to her face with gauze, and when Ben visited her there, she was peaceful and Kate-like, pleased by the oddities of medical science. She said, “Does it look like they’re stealing my brain?”

  “It doesn’t really look like the electrodes do anything.”

  “No,” she said. “It looks like an experiment done by an eight-year-old. I want to wear them home.”

  Then she insisted he take her picture, even though it made him feel like a ghoul.

  The neurologist couldn’t find anything. Kate didn’t have seizures. Kate didn’t have tumors. She hadn’t had a stroke. Kate said innocently, “That’s good, right?” and she and the neurologist laughed with relief while Ben continued to worry.

  The psychiatrist saw Kate five times before she would venture a diagnosis. There was a sense of the psychiatrist dragging her feet and wanting Kate to manifest some unequivocally damning symptom. Finally, at a conference with Ben and Kate, she listed Kate’s symptoms and said (her voice hypnotically calm while her eyes were pained and frantic) that the strong probability was schizophrenia, although there were atypical aspects and she knew the word was frightening. However, many patients had full lives. And there were still many things that weren’t known about the brain.

  She wrote Kate two prescriptions, and Ben and Kate went to the pharmacy together, a couple on an outing like any happy couple on a nice summer day. They would never go out like this to buy clothes for their baby. They would never shop for wedding rings. Ben was sick, somnambulistic, while he joked and acted like nothing had changed. Kate acted like nothing had changed, her black eyes deep and soft with fear.

  And she was kind, as no one else exactly was. She was generous and gallant in the face of it. He loved her. He couldn’t make do with anyone else.

  But he didn’t want to be his father. To have the years pass and all the optimism go, and the love, and then the madwoman went and died anyway. He couldn’t walk into that prison of his own free will.

  “Pills!” said Kate, at home with the vials of pills. She shook them to make a maracas sound.

  Ben said, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay. But I don’t know if I really ought to take these pills.”

  He caught his breath. He said, “Kate, listen …”

  But she wouldn’t listen, so Ben called Ágota. Then he called Salman, then Ágota again. He called Sabine. He told the story from beginning to end, four times, until he was choking on the story and he hated himself. He so didn’t want it to be true. Why did he have to tell it that way, like it was true?

  Then a long period in which he met people for drinks behind Kate’s back to talk about Kate. The world was a stress miasma; the people were faces in that miasma. He told people Kate would take the pills and it would all go away; or it would turn out to be nothing, it was all a mistake. Kate was such a happy person. And wasn’t schizophrenia a catch-all diagnosis for anything the doctors didn’t understand? It wasn’t schizophrenia, he said, but his mind said, It is schizophrenia, it’s fucking schizophrenia. You don’t get better from that.

  She too
k the pills but nothing changed. Days passed, and she was only more forthcoming with absurdities. She now explained that her dreams about the sixteenth century affected her waking life. She would wake to find the world was changed, as if her dreams were actual visits to the past, and the things she did there altered history. There, she’d met another time traveler, a man who was a minor Elizabethan playwright. They both had visions of a future apocalypse: a burnt, empty city in a world that was dead. She’d been trying to avert that doom, but now she was certain she was making things worse. She hoped the poet could change this picture, but she didn’t really see what he would do. He would write a world-changing play? It seemed like grasping at straws.

  Ben asked if she seriously believed all that. Kate said no—but still puzzled over it as if it were a matter of life and death. And she still talked about the world she had lost, the world with the Breadfruit Monarch and the pangolins, a world where the president was (Kate now confessed) not Gore but a woman named Chen.

  Of course, Chen was better than Gore. Everything was better in Kate’s lost world. The real world harrowed and shocked her, and Kate now openly remarked on its badness. She was scandalized by all the advertising (which was strictly regulated in her world) and surprised that people didn’t “just rise up.” How could there be so many homeless people when everyone else had money to burn, when they were going out to restaurants and buying new clothes? Why did policemen all have guns? If people could vote, why would anyone vote to give policemen guns? She had woken one morning and naively gone to the window and seen the street and found it lined by stores with dirty plastic signs that were bullyingly ugly, and above the stores were five stories of apartments—as Kate would learn that day, every city street was overshadowed now by walls of apartments, because there were seven billion people in the world, and all the billions kept breeding more people as the world died around them and it made no sense. Ben reacted defensively; he was of this world that wasn’t good enough for Kate. He bought new clothes. He liked some ads. He worked in public relations for ExxonMobil. He had always wanted children, ideally three. He had wanted children with Kate.

  One bad night, he mentioned nuclear weapons, and Kate said, “Wait, they make nuclear weapons?” and Ben said, “Uh-huh,” and Kate said she knew about them as a theory, but why would you make them when you knew you couldn’t use them? So Ben explained Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Kate got a terrible expression and said, “And they kept on making them?” Ben said, “Kate, you know all this,” but she needed him to tell her how many there were. Ben said he didn’t know, and she said, “How can you not know? Are there ten? Are there a thousand?” He pointed up to indicate there were more, and Kate freaked out and paced the floor all night and he only got three hours’ sleep.

  She was often unhappy. It wasn’t like Kate. The medication made her slow and stunned. She stared. Her eyes lost their keen profundity. She rapidly put on weight and would touch her newly amorphous belly with a tentative worry. She cried sometimes and didn’t want to say why. She didn’t want to see her parents. She wanted to go to sleep at nine.

  Most days, she sat around knitting or drawing. She acquired a guitar somewhere and would sit strumming sad, antiquated tunes she said she’d learned in her dreams. She hand-embroidered her clothes with birds and flowering trees and leaping deer; the embroidery was competent and pretty, but tended to make the clothes lose their shape. In them, she looked unpleasantly eccentric, like a member of a cult that required its followers to wear embroidered clothes.

  One week, her brother, Petey, came to visit, or was dispatched to visit by Salman and Ágota. He was surprisingly short, compact, and baby faced; he looked too young to be in college, although he was actually twenty-two. The first night he was there, Kate talked about her dreams, and Petey interrupted her unhappily, saying, “If talking about this stuff helps, you should feel free to talk about it anytime”—his way of saying he couldn’t stand to hear about it, that her sickness terrified him. After that, Kate stuck to Petey subjects—his college courses, the bike he was building, his Dungeons and Dragons character—and, possibly for that reason, seemed better. She started to laugh at jokes again, to comb her hair, to eat dessert. One night, she and Petey started speaking in Hungarian accents, saying lugubrious Hungarian things like: “I hope your year has not been too dismal” and “Well, it is marvelous that we are at least not dead,” and they conversed for an hour in these personas, making each other laugh so hard Petey curled up on the floor and kicked his feet. But then Petey left. It was back to square one.

  Another thing that comforted Kate was Qued, but her attachment to the baby was too intense; Ben suspected her of wanting to raise Qued according to the precepts of her imaginary world. It also meant Kate was often with José while Ben was out at work. She was always talking about José: what José had said, what José had done. She taught José one of her weird dream songs (about a man escaped from Bedlam, who roamed the streets begging) and they sang it as a lullaby together although it never put Qued to sleep. One day, she and José took Qued to the park and rented a canoe and rowed around the lake and both came home with sunburns, and Kate seemed happy for a change, much happier than Ben could make her. When Ben asked what they talked about, Kate said she couldn’t remember and looked defensive in a panicky way, as if Ben were threatening the one safe thing in her life.

  Ben couldn’t quite believe they were sleeping together. He didn’t like José, but it was partly because José was so morally serious; he made Ben feel meretricious by comparison. José knew all the local homeless people by name; he had a favorite Catholic philosopher; he wrote long letters to his mother in Denver because she didn’t like to talk on the phone. José wouldn’t sleep with someone else’s girlfriend. He wouldn’t take advantage of the mentally ill. Still, as a friendship, it felt implausible. It was like things Kate had told Ben in the early months, anomalous things that turned out to be symptoms.

  One day, Ben went with Kate to meet a mural client, a friend of Sabine’s who wanted a trompe l’oeil grotto painted in her bathroom. To Ben’s dismay, Kate announced up front that she had a mental illness and embarked on a description of her alternate world. Luckily, the woman (a veterinarian who was enormously fat and carried it in a no-nonsense way that made her immediately likable) was fascinated by Kate’s delusion. She made Kate sit while she opened a bottle of wine. The vet’s husband took Ben to see his vintage gun collection, to “let the ladies talk,” and Ben eavesdropped on Kate’s conversation while the husband handed him various rifles. It progressed exactly as Ben would expect, up until Kate said the worst thing was loneliness. Nobody else remembered Kate’s world—she was alone with her grief for losing that world—but she didn’t belong in this world, either.

  “Is there anyone you can talk to about it?” the vet asked sympathetically.

  There was a long pause then. Ben’s hands tightened on the Enfield rifle he was holding.

  Kate said, “Sometimes I talk to my friend José.”

  The flip side of that scene was a time Ben had lunch with Sabine at Amsterdam Bank, the lounge bar in the former Amsterdam Bank. It would have felt different (Ben thought afterward) if it had happened anywhere else. Even in the daytime, the place was deafening: club music and the people’s voices blaring over it, glasses and the screech of the espresso machine. The waitresses were all models and wore a uniform of short shorts and gold bikini tops. It was exploitative and crass, a Weimar atmosphere, the feeling of an orgy taking place as an asteroid approached that would obliterate Earth.

  That day they weren’t talking about Kate but about Sabine’s job at Credit Suisse and the bank bros there who threw screaming tantrums or bragged about prostitutes they’d fucked or hatched plots against each other, in the course of which they literally hissed like Kaa from The Jungle Book. Kindergarten bullshit, said Sabine; she didn’t know why she didn’t just quit. Why couldn’t she be like her cousin Eddie, the kaleidoscope heir, who didn’t feel like he had to do anything? Who
flew to Capri and back or bought houses in Maine, that was all he did.

  “You could do something else,” said Ben.

  “I already do something else.” Sabine picked up her drink, put it down. “Look, they gave me three olives in this fucking martini. It’s a meal. I should give this to the poor.”

  Then she talked about her political work, but by now she was forgetting to project her voice, and Ben couldn’t hear. He drifted off and thought about Sabine’s anorexia—whenever she mentioned food, it was impossible not to think about her anorexia, once so extreme it had given her a heart attack; she’d had to be shocked back to life by EMTs on her kitchen floor. The one time he’d been to Sabine’s apartment—a twelve-room penthouse where Sabine lived alone, and which belonged to her uncle who was currently away, as Sabine said, “raping Africa”—Ben had said, “Apartments this size scare me.” Sabine had said, “Well, it’s haunted. I died here.” (But Sabine had gotten better, so Kate might too.)

  At this point, Sabine stopped talking and made a face of unpleasant surprise. A shape loomed behind Ben—Oksana, who had crept up under cover of the noise and the golden, giraffe-like waitresses. She wore a faded bikini top and terry cloth gym shorts; it looked like a spoof of the waitress costume, although it was just what she often wore. On her bare midriff, you could see the nacreous pattern of her stretch marks, and on her arms a miscellany of self-harm scars and ballpoint-ink tattoos.

  Without preamble, Oksana announced it was her thirtieth birthday, and she’d decided to honor it by charging any man who wanted sex with her a thousand dollars. Fucking only; she wasn’t doing any other sex, because the fuck was the real, it was the animal act. This wasn’t prostitution. She had done prostitution, and so she knew. “The money is for the meaning when I am now a mother. I think it’s maybe not enough, one thousand, but I try this first and see.” By now, she was speaking directly to Ben.