Orange World and Other Stories

by Karen Russell

  Fury wheels around our boats, shrieking at such an earsplitting volume that it’s impossible to pinpoint the origin of the feeling.

  She poles up to me, our pupils shrinking in the doubled glare of the bow lights. Two voices swing out like hooks, each catching at the other:

  “What are you doing here?”

  The answer floats between us, mocking us. Vi has always seemed to be light-years ahead of me. Perhaps she is as surprised as I am to discover how we overlap.

  “Did you come here to find me?” Vi asks me in a stricken voice.

  Her face seems to float, unanchored, isolated by the light. I think about lying, then shake my head.

  “No. I wanted to come out here, to swim.”

  “So did I,” says my sister, with the ghost of a smile.

  Our calamity strikes me, suddenly, as terribly funny. No less astonishing a coincidence, in its way, than being born into the same family.

  “How long have you been swimming here?”

  “Oh,” Vi says pensively, chewing on her thumb pad. “Years.”

  Years!

  One of us asks: “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  One of us says to the other: “It is so selfish to come here.”

  One of us is burning with shame—is it hers or my own?

  One of us shouts: “Who am I hurting?”

  And we scream at each other: “Me!”

  Silence rips apart down the middle. Silence reveals its tiny serrated fangs. Have we loved each other well? Could we love each other better? I realize that there is so much we have never told one another, and likely never will. Secrets multiply throughout our hangar. A hundred doors that we refuse to test with speech. A hundred others that we pretend are walls. If I were braver, I would fling my voice against them, at the exact pitch to pick the locks. If I were braver, and if I were a better singer.

  In a whisper, I tell Viola about my last fare. How I listened, paralyzed, while the moment when I might have saved him flipped into the moment of his death.

  To my great surprise, she does not pull away from me. I watch the story fall into her open pupils and prepare myself for Vi’s disgust, her anger. But it’s love, uninjured, that floats to the surface.

  “It’s a shame we weren’t alive then,” Vi murmurs. “We could have told them how to build the seawall. We could have listened for the weak spots.”

  Over her shoulder, I see a rolling darkness. I have the nauseating thought that the man’s green slicker might come floating our way, carrying the glowing algae.

  “Can you hear anything out there, Vi?”

  “Just you, talking. But let’s keep trying.”

  I crawl into Vi’s gondola and hitch my boat to her stern. We try and fail to find a signal. The rain returns, lashing the black water between our boats. Soon she, too, loses her voice. This rain stings wherever it touches our skin. Vi gives up on poling and sits in the stern behind me; I feel the weight of her chin on my left shoulder. She runs the flats of her palms down my curved spine, pressing at the bony knobs. “This is how sisters tune one another,” she used to tell me when I was small, to spare my pride when I woke up afraid from a dream and needed her to hold me.

  I wonder if we will ever reach the end of the deadspot. It seems to keep spinning us back into it, a hungry red mouth.

  “Blister,” Vi says, in her flattened voice. “Do you remember the mice?”

  We had a single children’s book when I was growing up, with a superficially cheerful, apocalyptic plotline. One mouse after another tumbles into a muddy hole, each trying to rescue the others. A family of mice doomed by their clumsiness and by their love, perhaps by a secret wish to save themselves. And saved they must have been, by some tractor pull of grace, because no children’s book ends with the death of every protagonist.

  But my mind cannot conceive of a way out of our predicament; in fact, my mind has become the hole.

  “Are we going to die now?” Vi asks me.

  I shake my head, touched that she’s sought out my opinion. Another milestone.

  “We should never have come here.” Vi shudders. “I am sure they are out looking for us.”

  Mila and Luna. Perhaps we’ll hear their voices soon, behind the curtain of rain. I think about the storybook mice, steering a teacup on the high seas. In a family of sisters, everybody gets to play all the parts, the brave ones and the cowards, the doomed ones and the saviors.

  We toss our raw voices into the wind. We are rowing sightlessly, possibly in circles, as the keening begins. When the first echo reaches me, I mistake it for a symptom of exhaustion. Another echo returns to me, although my lips are sealed.

  “Listen,” Vi says, tugging at my elbow.

  “I hear it, too. You’re not crazy. Or we’re both crazy.”

  Behind me I feel Viola tense. The ocean is breaking into pieces. New pairs of eyes shine up at us below the gunwales: fluorescent, enormous disks, orange and purple and salt white, inlaid in the angular faces of some schooling species I have never seen before. I know the old stories about dolphins saving humans, but these are not dolphins, and they seem wholly oblivious of us, even as their keening penetrates our bones. A humming enters my chest and begins to grow—a deep, marine roar. Vi wraps her arms around me, and I feel grateful for her heartbeat; I’d go mad in a second if I was hearing this alone. This new song is wrenching my mind wider than it wants to open, faster than I am ready to go. “I’m not ready!” I scream hoarsely, because I can feel myself getting spun into something so much larger than I am, vibrating at a frequency that is not human. Echoes leap into us from dimensions that seem impossibly remote—shivering treetops and submerged walls, the tiny bones of unborn animals. We hear the hollows, the where-to-gos. Spaces in the ruins that cry out with the tides: This is not the end of the world. This is not the end of the world.

  Without turning, I can feel Vi’s lips parting, preparing to sing along. Vi, Vi, I want to beg like a child, please, wait for me. I had wanted to dissolve on my own terms, and only temporarily; if we go through this door, what will we become? Other singers push into my mind, the gibbering moon and the silver mangroves and the buried coral. I am afraid of the voices lifting out of the dark. I am afraid to join them. But perhaps we will have to, if we want to survive.

  Orange World

  ABNORMAL RESULT. HIGH RISK.

  CLINICAL OUTCOME UNKNOWN.

  At night, Rae pulls a pillow between her legs and lets the pain scissor at her. She feels like a gutshot animal lying in the road. Rae was not raised with religion, so when she sees the blood in the toilet she invents her own prayers. After the results from the third set of tests come back, she starts begging anything that might be listening to save her baby.

  And then, lo, something does answer.

  I can help you. It spoke without speaking, glowing low on the horizon. She had made it over the ledge of 4 a.m. to 5 a.m., what she’d once believed to be a safe hour. The out-of-the-woods hour.

  What are you?

  The voice tipped out of the red light.

  That’s the wrong question. What would you like me to do?

  * * *

  “Orange World,” the New Parents Educator says, “is where most of us live.”

  She shows a slide: a smiling baby with a magenta birthmark hooping her eye. No—a burn mark. The slides jump back in time, to the irreversible error. Here is the sleepy father, holding a teapot.

  Orange World is a nest of tangled electrical cords and open drawers filled with steak knives. It’s a baby’s fat hand hovering over the blushing coils of a toaster oven. It’s a crib purchased used.

  “We all make certain compromises, of course. We do things we know to be unsafe. You take a shower with your baby, and suddenly—”

  The Educator knocks her fist on the tabl
e, to mimic the gavel rap of an infant’s skull on marble. Her voice lowers to a whisper, to relate the final crime: “You fall asleep together on the sofa. Only one of you wakes up.”

  Don’t fall asleep, Rae dutifully takes down. Orange World.

  They have already covered Green World, a fantasy realm of soft corners and infinite attention. Orange World, it seems, is this world, viewed through a spyglass of fire. WELCOME HOME, BABY! says a banner hanging in the classroom’s dark corner.

  “I want to acknowledge that Green World is the ideal, but Orange World is where most of us live,” the Educator repeats.

  Next, they watch a parental horror movie in photo stills, titled Red World. The Educator, in her bright Australian accent, encourages them to imagine babies falling down stairwells and elevator chutes. Speared by metal and flung from passenger seats. Drowning in toilet bowls and choking on grapes.

  Rae has never made it this far into a pregnancy before. Hers is a geriatric pregnancy. Her husband finds this language hilarious. “Like Sarah in the Bible.”

  Everybody gets a swaddle and a baby doll. The head comes off of Rae’s. While she is jamming the head back on, the swaddle floats to the ground. Picking the swaddle up, she steps on it.

  Sneaker bacteria: Orange World. Decapitation: Red World.

  “Your head is on backward, love.”

  The Educator watches as Rae wrenches it around.

  “You should go to the New Moms Group,” the Educator suggests. “It’s a great resource for first-time mothers. Veteran moms show you the ropes.”

  Rae smiles and thanks her. In this crowded room of cheerful, expectant people, there is no space to say, I don’t know if there will be a baby.

  * * *

  On the first night that the devil appeared to her, her husband was on a trip to New York to woo new clients. “Woo,” what a dumb verb. “Woo!” she screamed, dropping to all fours on the stairs. The pain expanded to fill the empty house. When the pain threatened to take off the roof, she pulled on a wool shirt and stumbled into the moonlit street, a hand spread against her belly. “Help me,” Rae begged. The neighboring houses stared down at her like blank-faced jurors. She limped across the road. Strange light brimmed in the gutter that ran along the sidewalk. Its source was unclear. As she advanced, the light changed color, developing a reddish tint. It was a very short step through this mist into the gutter. Wading through ankle-deep water, Rae cried out. Pain folded her knees below her. A taut and fiery string ran from her pelvis to her throat, and it felt as though some secret hand kept plucking at it. This is how the devil woos you, before you know it is the devil. A bodiless, luminous voice rose out of the storm drain.

  “Yes,” she heard herself promise. “Anything.”

  * * *

  Three months later, Rae pauses in the bedroom doorway to watch her newborn son breathing. He’s got a very mature snore, this baby. His father is also sawing logs. She could listen to their duet all night. Green World. The baby was born on the winter solstice, emerging into a world of lengthening light. He was born healthy, just as the voice in the gutter had promised.

  Already, Rae’s brain has rewired itself to wake her at 4:35 a.m. Outside, snow pours through the neighbors’ leafless birches. The flakes feel wonderful on her upturned face, her fever-freckled chest. Why hadn’t she thought to appeal to heaven, Rae wonders now. She took the first deal offered. She’d done a better job negotiating for the Subaru.

  Rae kneels in the gutter, on a thick paste of dead leaves. She unbuttons her shirt to the navel. Snow wakes groggily into water, a trickling stream that carries beer tabs and flashing ice into the storm drain. She fishes for the clasp of her bra. Her breasts are straining against the thin lace. On the opposite side of the street, her own home gazes back at her. The windows look like holes that any monster could reach through; the walls seem blue and pregnable. Like clockwork, at 4:44, the devil appears, making itself out of fog and solidifying. Its tone has changed completely since the baby’s birth. No longer does it offer any green guarantees, promising safety to her child, her friends, her family. These nights it’s all red threat: Feed me, or else.

  So she does.

  The gutter is a cold canoe. Rae lowers onto an elbow, stretching flat. Asphalt pushes at her shoulders, her tailbone. It seems impossible that she hasn’t gotten sick yet, in all these weeks of appointments. Perhaps the devil is keeping her well. She tries not to look at it; when she looks at it, her milk dries up. It lays its triangular head on her collarbone, using its thin-fingered paws to squeeze milk from her left breast into its hairy snout. Its tail curls around her waist. Unlike her son, the devil has dozens of irregular teeth, fanged and broken, in three rows; some lie flat against the gums, like bright arrowheads in green mud. Its lips make a cold collar around her nipple. She feels the tugging deep in her groin, a menstrual aching. Milk gushes out of her, more milk than it seems any single body could possibly produce; more milk, she’s sure, than her baby ever gets.

  Below her, the devil makes a queer gurgling sound. Tonight it has a long paddlelike tail, erratically needled, like a balding cactus, which lashes at her side; she feels blood racing away from a fresh cut. It drinks. It drinks. More milk floods around its lips, turning its fur shiny and wet.

  She hears the devil’s swallows slowing, its thorny lashes fluttering against her skin. Its head lolls onto her chest, breath whistling through its teeth. Without thinking, she smooths a raw spot between its ears.

  “Goddammit!”

  The devil has bitten her; it pushes off her stomach with its clawed feet. It wobbles through the melting snow, its belly swaying beneath it, and vanishes through the bars of the storm drain. She stares at the eerie triple imprint of its teeth, already shrinking from view. The first time, she thought that she’d have to disguise these scratches and bruises, the bloody evidence of their feedings. But, by true dawn, the worst of the wounds had vanished, erased by some bad magic, leaving only a lurid rash. She is back in bed three minutes before her husband stirs on the pillow.

  “There you are,” he says, smiling. “Our boy slept well, didn’t he!”

  * * *

  Rae’s mother calls to see how things are going.

  Her mother would be here, but she is caring for her own mother on the opposite side of the world, in a hospice facility. Her heart is breaking not to be with her daughter, just as Rae’s is breaking not to be with her mother and her grandmother. The breaking is continuous—in the ouroboros of caretaking, guilt and love and fear and love continuously swallow one another.

  “I love you,” they tell each other frequently on these calls. More truth won’t fit through the tiny colander of the telephone receiver.

  Rae admits that she is having some difficulties with nursing.

  “Oh, God, don’t feel guilty!” her mother says. “Give him a bottle, already. You were all formula-fed, and look how you turned out!”

  This is not particularly reassuring to Rae, although she appreciates the impulse. There is no natural moment in the conversation to say, Mother, the devil has me.

  * * *

  Sixteen weeks into the pregnancy, Rae had received a call from a genetic counselor. Something had gone from being possibly wrong to probably wrong.

  In her dream that night, the genetic counselor was picking out nail polish for her. “This black? Or this black? This one?”

  In the best of circumstances, a pregnancy was a walk down a gangplank. But theirs were not the best of circumstances, the genetic counselor had told Rae and her husband. It is a scary result, she acknowledged. The numbers kept changing on them: 1/100, 1/50, 1/14. Even early on, when the odds were with them, Rae had feared this outcome.

  Somebody has to be the 1.

  With a dark egotism, she felt certain that she and the baby would be the raffle winners.

  If you belie
ve that, what else do you believe?

  But then, a day later, by the train tracks, where pollen floats in a spectral yellow migration to the Willamette River, two deer appear. Fawns, preceding their mother like tiny spotted footmen.

  It’s a sign.

  It’s a sign.

  All will be well.

  And still she hears the calm, dry voice inside her: If you believe that, what else do you believe?

  * * *

  Even as a girl, Rae was a terrible negotiator. She gave anybody anything they asked of her. She owed the world; the world owned her. She never felt that she could simply take up space; no, one had to earn one’s keep here on planet Earth. As a kid, Rae’s body soundlessly absorbed the painful things that happened to it, and not even an echo of certain events escaped her lips. Sometimes she thought the problem (the gift, she’d once believed) was anatomical; she didn’t seem to have a gag reflex, so none of the secret stuff—the gushy black awful stuff—ever came out. Now it lives inside her, liquefying. Inadmissible, indigestible event. Is that what the devil is drinking?

  At 9:09 and 11:32 and 1:19 and 2:04 and 3:22 and 6:12, Rae’s son wakes up. They wake together, her eyes flying open just as his wailing rises beside her. Before she knows what she is, she is rolling toward his voice. Night brightens into morning, and they are together for the pivot.

  Green World. The wailing is profoundly consolable. It is the question to which she is the answer. The milk satisfies hunger and thirst; it moves softly between their bodies, quieting both of them. Joy has been the great surprise of motherhood. The flood of love for the baby is so fierce that she is always trying to qualify it to herself, to hide it from her own inner sight. Hormones—of course it’s all hormones. Hormones? Under her chin, the baby burps. He is wearing pajamas that make him look like a tiny medieval friar. The love winging around the room scares her with its annihilating force. It’s loosening the corset strings of her history, the incarcerated fat of “personality.” She and the baby are one body again, nourishing itself.