The Answers

by Catherine Lacey

  The room was in an unusual state of disarray, the screens still on, the desk scattered with notes and photographs and files. The middle of the screen triptych was paused on an image Ashley recognized, an evening last week when her assignment had been to interrupt Kurt and Mary in the middle of a dinner. She tried to find a way to play the scene, but the computer seemed to be locked. When she looked over some of the papers—an outline of scenes, a script, photographs of various women taken from strange angles, Ashley among them—it all became clear and sickening. She ripped up the pages and photos, pushed the desk over, threw anything she could at the three screens, stormed from the room, and heard the elevator arrive just as she turned the corner, Mary blinking in the light after taking off her hood.

  Hardly anyone can remember how this attack happened—Mary and Kurt and Ashley each have their own accounts, incorrect and incomplete. Mary screamed at some point or perhaps did not, and Ashley was silent or may have said something to Kurt as she did her work. One surveillance video did capture a shot of Kurt as he staggered into a room and fell, his arm flopping out of its socket, the emergency-exit alarm blaring, Ashley gone, blood drizzling from Kurt’s nose and smeared across his white tuxedo shirt, the black jacket heaped aside like roadkill.

  Mary hardly remembers anything about the ambulance, only that she didn’t think she’d be allowed to ride with him to the hospital because she wasn’t family, but Kurt had insisted, pain drunk, and the EMTs let her in, and as they sped through the night, Mary felt an emotional vertigo of looking backward and forward at once, seeing a younger version of herself look at this older version of herself, a dizzy confusion over how her life could have gone this way. There was no real path, it seemed, no logical way to live. Everything was a broken, blood-filled mess.

  Still in her Gala gown in the hospital’s waiting room, she glimpsed a television screen hanging in the corner and finally saw what everyone else had seen: a faceless woman hanging stiff on Kurt’s arm. The manic editing (four seconds here, three seconds there, a zoom-in on Kurt’s face, a pan-up shot of the whole gown, a zoom-in on the silk bag, back to a split screen of commentators, back to Kurt, the gown, and back again) was dizzying and she could only watch for half a minute before she had to close her eyes. How does this world survive itself?

  The waiting room was full of the bandaged, the moaning, the sleeping, the angry, the despondent, the anxiously hopeful. None of them had noticed her or Ashley, all of them stuck in their personal emergencies. This was a good place, she realized, to be invisible. She felt a hand on her shoulder and expected a nurse to be there; when she looked up, it was Ashley, radiant, backlit, saintlike. They didn’t say anything and Ashley eventually lowered herself into the seat beside Mary. The muted television played the same images of Kurt and the bag-headed Mary on a loop and Ashley watched for a moment, eventually turning to Mary.

  We don’t know each other, Ashley said, almost whispering, not really, but in some ways we know each other completely.

  Mary wasn’t sure what to say, wasn’t sure if there was anything she could say and wasn’t sure if she still had the ability to speak, this late, this tired, this bewildered.

  In a way, Ashley said, rising suddenly as she spoke, we’re practically sisters—

  She left quickly then, and for a moment Mary considered running after her, dashing into the night, throwing her dead phone into a sewer, walking whatever distance between this hospital and home, forgetting all of this had ever happened and just leaving, quitting, finding some other way to be, but just then a nurse did appear, brought her back to see Kurt, and if any of these midnight nurses knew who he was, they didn’t let on, treated his body as if it were any body, though he wasn’t alert enough to notice.

  His shoulder and arm had been mashed back into place but would be tender and bruised for a while and he had a concussion, someone explained, some young man with heavy bags under his eyes, and Mary was told that concussions are both common and mysterious, might mean nothing and might mean, days or weeks from now, Kurt could suddenly fall dead to the ground or maybe just have a headache or mild vertigo. He was probably still in shock but he knew his own name, what year it was, the president, so all he needed now was to rest.

  Nothing we can do about it, the doctor said, nothing I can really tell you.

  When they got back home, Kurt was zombified on painkillers, still in his tux pants and bloodstained shirt, leaning heavily on Mary, but Matheson had been waiting and began barking at her—

  Why didn’t you call me, I can’t believe you didn’t call me—I didn’t even know what hospital they’d sent you—a massive oversight, Mary, totally unprofessional. I have to hear from Jorge about the paparazzi and you won’t even pick up your phone! What the fuck?

  She squinted at him, felt the day had lasted too long.

  Go home. Don’t come back until I call you, Matheson said, leaving her in the lobby as he guided Kurt to the elevator, arm around his waist, limping together.

  Awake alone, early morning, does a person ever wish for instructions on how to best love the other people sleeping in their home—their children or partners, blood and chosen families?

  And if that person overhears those people clinking glasses and mugs in the kitchen—asking about coffee, are we out of juice, and what about the weather—does that person wonder if they’re loving their people correctly? When those people yawn or sneeze or when they’re silent as morning radio tells them everything, where exactly is the love between the person and their people? Is it a scent in the room? Is it located in the memory? Is it, like out-of-season clothes, in the basement?

  And when the people cannot find their shoes, their keys, their wallets, and when they ask the person if they’ve seen them and when the person says they haven’t, is there a part of the person that wishes they had? Does the person wish they knew where everything went? Does the person wish they knew, for certain, for absolute certain, what their glances and touches and voices really do to those people? Does the person ever wish for brain scans, diagnostics, something firm to back up their soft feelings?

  How to best love? How to know anything, for certain, in another’s heart?

  Such a serious thing we are doing, and no one really knows how to do it.

  Part Three

  One

  I woke up with nothing. A silent apartment. I had no pain, no need. Nothing to struggle against or for. I fell asleep and when I woke again, I couldn’t tell how much time had passed, how much of myself I’d given over to absence.

  I had a whole bed and home to myself, days and weeks and a life to myself, and if I died, I knew I’d only be found from the smell. That’s something that happened here, dying alone, your door being hacked down to find your apartment not fit for company. New Yorkers performed this anxiety as a way to bond with one another, but if you had this worry alone, if you had no one to tell, if there was no one there to tell you—No, that won’t happen to you, not you—well. This thought can take strange shapes in an empty room. So I don’t let myself worry about this anymore, but sometimes I feel as if it might be worrying about me.

  A voice in another apartment disappeared into the walls between us, muffled like a song in radio static. From my bed I strained to listen to whatever was being said, and eventually I got out of bed and went to the living room to be nearer to the voice. I crouched by the wall to listen but still understood nothing. Would it have mattered to that stranger to know I had tried?

  A couch was in my living room. I remembered being here when the two deliverymen unboxed it, assembled it, took away all the cardboard and plastic, but the presence of the couch still confused me. I had not yet allowed myself to sit on the couch, as I felt it did not belong to me. I had the sense that I was a stranger living as a stranger in a stranger’s body in yet another stranger’s home. Perhaps one of the strangers I had once been had bought it. It was pale blue, the only furniture, the only anything, in the living room. Sometimes when I came home from my GX shifts, it surprise
d me, a mute intruder.

  I went to the kitchen to drink water straight from the faucet, passing the previous night’s gown crumpled on the hallway floor. It reminded me a little of a snakeskin that had mesmerized me in a forest.

  I wondered what the Gala had looked like beyond that sack over my head.

  I thought of Clara, for some reason. I knew I should call her or find a neighbor who might check on her, something I’d been meaning to do and somehow not doing for months. I stared into a dusty corner. Eventually I felt the light shift to afternoon and I still had done nothing to prove I’d been alive today. Something potential turned suddenly kinetic in me, and I felt I had to make up for everything I had not done. I found some old newspaper and vinegar and cleaned the windows, until I began to wonder why I was doing this naked, so I went to the bedroom to put on a shirt, but I ended up just pulling the sheet off the bed and wrapping it around me, then realizing I hadn’t yet brushed my teeth, so I went to the bathroom to do that but got distracted by the couch, which I had still been putting off sitting on for some reason so I went and sat there, saw the rotary phone I hadn’t used in months and picked it up without thinking and dialed Aunt Clara’s number, and as it rang, I felt aware of my legs and arms in this tangled sheet, pressing into the sofa, the sofa pushing back on me, some strange force within it.

  Clara’s phone rang and rang, no answer, but I was determined to reach her, if not by phone then by plane, by car, by my legs, by my face, by myself. That’s what people did. People looked into the eyes of the people who had brought them here, brought them to this planet, raised them. Didn’t those people have a clue about why you might be here? Didn’t those people maybe have an opinion? Some ideas? I was tired of my life happening to me. I needed to make things happen.

  I found the GX phone under the gown and it was, as they say, dead, so I plugged it in, waited for its resurrection, its messages—none—but I soon found how easy it was to find people’s names and numbers and where they lived. In minutes I had the phone numbers for the homes on either side of Clara. The first call I made, a little boy picked up the phone and I asked if his mother was there (No) or his father (No) or anyone (Not anyone). I asked him how old he was and he said, Four. I’m big. I didn’t know what to do so I told him bye and he said bye. Anyway, I cried for a while after that, wiping my eyes with the sheet.

  The second number I called, I got this middle-aged female voice and I told her who I was, Mrs. Parsons’s niece, and just from the way she said, Oh, Mrs. Parsons, I could tell and was relieved that Clara wasn’t dead.

  Could you go check on her? I’m just worried because I can’t seem to get her on the phone.

  Oh, well, I suppose I could, but I probably can’t make it out there until tomorrow.

  That’s fine, I said, confused about why it would take so long to walk next door but not wanting to make a thing of it.

  But I suppose you could just call the front desk yourself and get ahold of her a little quicker.

  The front desk?

  Yes, at Green Meadow?

  I’m sorry?

  Well, I thought you would have known. They had to move her out to a nursing home over across town a few months ago now?

  I didn’t—I wasn’t—

  Well, I can tell you what happened, you see, she hadn’t been putting her trash can out for the trucks, and it had piled up in her garage, and we caught wind of it, so to speak, so I dropped in on her and it was clear she hadn’t been keeping house like she used to. A little baby raccoon had even settled into the kitchen and she didn’t seem to realize. I asked her if there was someone I could call for her, someone to come check on her, and she told me to call Tom, which just about broke my heart, Mary. Just about broke it. If I had known about you, I would have called, but she didn’t remember having any other family. I thought she had a sister still living, so I tried looking through her papers, but I couldn’t find a phone number or anything. So I didn’t know who to call is what I’m saying. I’m sorry, dear, this must be a lot to take in.

  I felt like that little boy, like that four-year-old. I said thank you or something, and she kept going, explained something about a social worker and Clara’s pension. I hung up the phone and this time I didn’t cry. I felt something sitting very still in me, something that had stopped moving altogether.

  The phone screen lit up with an alert—an e-mail from Chandra, the first all week. There was no body, just an attachment: a grainy photograph of Kurt and me in the silk dress and hood. It felt so strangely foreign, like a photograph of a long-dead stranger, someone I never knew. I could have been surprised that she knew it was me or that she sent more than a dozen additional images of my anonymized body next to Kurt’s extremely public one. But I wasn’t shocked. I didn’t have anything left in me anymore.

  Two

  I didn’t consider buying a plane ticket, I was just suddenly leaving, arriving, renting a car, listening to a rigid voice tell me when and where to turn, how far I was from where I was going. Green Meadow was (unsurprisingly) not a meadow and not green. The squat building was surrounded on all sides by fields of sunburned straw. A nurse at the front desk was eating orange things from a foil pouch. I told her who I was and who I was here to see (Uh-huh, she said) and while I was alone in the waiting room full of dusty plastic plants, I fought a constant urge to go back out to that rental car, to ask that soothing plastic woman to tell me how to get somewhere, to get anywhere.

  Then they wheeled this person to me, Clara or whoever Clara was now, shrunken and hunched, head nodding and nodding. The nurse yelled, That’s your niece, Mrs. Parsons. Her name is Mary. She came here to see you, and left us to see each other. We smiled, both confused. I wanted to ask her what had happened and I wanted to say I was sorry and I wanted to say that I loved her, that I had thought of her so much more than she could ever know, but I didn’t say any of that.

  I said, not thinking, Aunt Clara, I missed you. (Not I have missed you, not I missed you and now you’re here, but something closer to what I said to Paul that night, that I missed him to his face—because I knew the Clara I had known was now over, that I had missed her, that now this remainder of her was here, not her, but a memory of that person.)

  Oh! she said. And I missed you, too. But here we are, now.

  Her voice was bumpy and clogged, but she spoke with the rhythm of a small child, that perplexed wonder. We were quiet. I didn’t know what to say. I asked her if she liked living here.

  They put me out to pasture … on this Green Meadow. I suppose I’ll stay here awhile.

  Her hands were shaking as she gestured vaguely to the waiting room.

  But they have all these damn fake plants! Tom had a fit. He hates these things. Hates them!

  It was not at all funny but I laughed—Tom was alive and he hated fake plants.

  Well, it seems we’ve been out here an awful long time, she said. I’m sure you need to get going. I’m sure you’ve got better things to do.

  Well, no. I’m actually just here to see you.

  Oh. Oh, that’s right.

  She nodded, staring at me with a sudden terror, and I started to reach out for her hand but she shrank away from me. We were quiet. She chewed her bottom lip, looking at different parts of my body as if trying to add me all up—my feet, my hands, my knees.

  You came back.

  Yes.

  How?

  I flew. She squinted at me. From New York? Remember?

  Florence.

  Yes, that’s my mother. I’m your niece. Mary.

  No. Junia.

  That’s— I hesitated. Yes. That’s who I am.

  Junia? Her face scrunched up as if she were going to cry, but it seemed nothing was left in her to let out. Did you see it happen?

  See what happen?

  I just don’t know how a person can be like he is. I never— She stopped, her face slack. She was silent awhile.

  Clara?

  Yes, she said, not looking up, and a loudspeaker thunder
ed above us.

  —Good afternoon, Green Meadow! Bible study will begin shortly in the rec room. That’s Bible study, in the rec room, with Pastor Hank, beginning shortly.—

  I reckon I’ve studied the Bible enough. She smiled.

  I did my best to look or seem happy to be here, but I didn’t know what to say anymore, why I’d come at all. For lack of anything else to say I asked her how long she’d been here.

  They put me out to pasture. On Green Meadow. I suppose I’ll stay here awhile.

  —For those of you who missed it, I said Bible. Study. In the rec room. Please head to the rec room now if you want to participate in Bible study today. Thank you!—

  I reckon I’ve studied the Bible enough.

  I felt the phone buzzing in my pocket—I hadn’t realized I had it on me.

  Well, hasn’t this been nice? she asked.

  —Matheson—

  Clara—can you hold on for one second? I was already standing and heading toward the door. I have to just answer this, just one minute.

  She waved at me.

  We need you to come to the loft as soon as possible, he said.

  I can’t.

  What?

  I left town. I’m in Tennessee, with family. (The word felt strange in my mouth.)

  And what on earth are you— No—it doesn’t matter. You should know you’re not supposed to travel without permission.

  It was urgent, and I’m on a break, I thought. My aunt—

  It’s in your contract, Mary. You should know that.

  I did, it was just an emergency—

  And who else had an emergency recently, Mary? Have you already forgotten?

  No, I understand but—

  No, you don’t seem to understand. That’s exactly the problem. Your data from the past two weeks has been very erratic. Can you tell me what the most important requirement of your role in the experiment is?