The visitors assemble around Rosie and draw closer. When she sits up irritably, they scatter to the corners of the room, then draw back, flaunting themselves and their lives—their lives which are so particular and binding, as heavy as crowns and gold chains and royal robes. The weight falls across Rosie’s mouth and nose as she lies back down to sleep. She can hardly breathe.
People always say, you can’t run away. It’s one of those things Rosie’s heard a million times: Whatever it is you’re running from, people say, you’re sure to bring it with you. But that’s not her problem, Rosie thinks—not at all. Unless what she always had was nothing.
When she came to this city and left what—at least, in her opinion—was quite a lot, back at Ian’s, there must have been something in her mind which made it possible for her to leave: she must have thought that while she (as it had suddenly come to appear) was taking time out the shuttle kept on moving back and forth; she must have thought that she could weave herself back into the web whenever she was ready; she must have thought it would be obvious what she was supposed to do next; she must have thought she’d just find herself doing whatever it was people did. Who knows what she was thinking? Whatever it was, she was wrong.
Once in a while she resorts to the notion that Ian is back there wishing her well, in whatever manner he can. She draws strength from that, she thinks. Oh, well; shit.
No doubt he’d been incensed to find her gone. Still, she left all her effects—the pretty suède pouch containing her syringe, her silver spoon, her rubber tubing, everything—right there on the pillow, so he’d see right away, and he’d know, more or less, just what she’d be going through. Better than leaving a note, Rosie thought—she just didn’t know what more to say.
From time to time she regrets not having told Ian she was leaving. But what was the point? She was leaving. And Ian would have said no, stay, he’d help her to stop; hadn’t he always told her to stop? Just what she needed, Rosie thinks—Ian in charge of her free will.
It’s not Ian’s way to lie, but Rosie has to wonder what he really wanted from her. All that talk about his clients—their weakness, their needs, the things they pretended to themselves. But the whole point, Rosie thinks, is that, high, she was as strong as wire, she needed nothing, and she never had to pretend a thing. All that talk about Rosie abusing her body (with not a word, of course, about what her body was doing to her!), but how did Ian think he’d met her, if not selling her and Cathy what they’d started snorting during lunch hour, years ago? The truth is, Ian could afford to say anything at all that made him feel righteous: it seemed he could count on her not to stop.
Another one of those things that Rosie’s heard for years and years is people asking other people, Why did you start taking drugs? You turn on the television and you hear that. But this is not a real question; it’s just a sticky, juicy treat. Pornography. The shining faces, the eager and self-congratulatory answers—everyone feels great, everyone’s rubbing it in their hair. My mother, my father, whatever—not real answers, but the question’s not a real question. Why did you start taking drugs? Not a real question. Here, the real question: Why didn’t you, dear? No. The real question: Why did you stop?
Not long before Rosie left, Ian took her on a call to some clients. There was an architect, and a man who owned a restaurant that the architect had designed, and their wives. It was an occasion, a birthday party, of sorts. Ian, as usual, wore his English hat with his initials stamped in gold on the inside band, and he carried his good briefcase. Very impressive, no doubt, to the hopheads stumbling around River Street, but the architect and the restaurateur were wearing suits obviously woven of fibers plucked for them personally from some rare beast. One of the wives wore a suit as well, a tiny little black thing, and the other wife wore a tiny little black dress. The house, which the architect had designed, was glaringly white. Almost the only color in it, aside from the soft green of Rosie’s longish, graceful dress, was a huge crystal vase of roses, dark, dark red, like a blackening heart.
Ian had been called in to supply the birthday present—for the architect, as Rosie remembers, though all four of those people were pretty jacked up, controlled and furtively absent, like kids who have planned to sneak out and have sex.
The whole thing is even worse to remember than it was when it was happening. Ian and his database; earlier that evening he’d called the architect and the restaurateur up on the screen to make Rosie look. Lists of accomplishments vibrated in the synthetic blue depths. “Prominent people,” Ian had said.
The lowered eyes, the swinishly clean whiteness, the hair like sculpture—Rosie practically gags, thinking of it. Never has she heard the words “my wife” used so often in so short a time. At moments the two couples had behaved as though Ian and Rosie weren’t there; at other moments they were terribly, terribly polite—as if Ian and Rosie were the stableboys, called away from rolling in manure to come into the house for, say, a Christmas eggnog. What a waste of good drugs.
Ian had hustled Rosie along. They were just going to drop by on this thing, he’d said; they’d be home in good time, he meant, before she got uncomfortable. But then he was talking and talking. He knew about everything, of course. He knew about the new restaurant and other buildings the architect had designed, the wine they were all drinking, the variety of rose in the big crystal vase. Naturally he knew about the house—building techniques, materials…pretty much whatever could be known.
Rosie could perfectly well have excused herself and emerged decorously from the bathroom in mere minutes, in a much more accommodating frame of mind—she’d tucked her pouch prudently in her purse—but Ian would have gone absolutely nuts.
The little thorns of his voice caught and caught at her. She made herself get up, cross the room, and examine the bookshelves. In all those shelves there were about ten books—the tall kind, with pictures. She opened one: photograph after photograph showed a nude girl strapped down, with medical equipment inserted into her. Rosie closed her eyes, as if to bring the ocean, and a whooshing sound came up around her. Cars, obviously, going and going outside on the highway. When she turned around again, Ian was nowhere to be seen.
She found him standing in the long sweep of the kitchen. His briefcase was open and his scales were out on the table. The wife in the suit was there, too, counting out money, slowly and carefully, her head tilted down as she watched the bills leave her hands. Her thick lashes were very dark against her skin, and her smooth hair was pouring slowly forward. Ian leaned against the refrigerator, not touching the money, of course, or even looking at it. “I have to get back,” Rosie said. Ian glanced at her, and his glance held. “Right,” he said. “With you in a sec.”
The others seemed not to have moved while Rosie was out of the room. The air was fantastically still. “It’s going to storm,” she said, but none of the others responded. Perhaps she hadn’t actually spoken.
“Where’s Ashley?” one of the men said.
“Out in the kitchen,” the other man said. “With the Connoisseur. Your competition.” And they made that little pause that stands for a laugh.
On the way home, Ian was calm, and happy, telling Rosie about a building in Seattle that the architect had designed. Yes, Rosie kept saying; that’s great, yes. It was like listening to the happy stories of a child who doesn’t yet know his home has been destroyed in a fire.
How could he have been such an idiot? And those people! How pleased they were with themselves—with all their things, with all their accomplishments. My wife, my wife…So pleased to have used their time so well. Those people had treated their lives so well, tending them and worshipping them and using them (however moronically), and she had just tossed hers into the freezer, like some old chunk of something you didn’t exactly know what to do with. But why should her life be more despised than theirs?
Yeah, you’ve got to play your cards right with time, Rosie thinks. It’s not merely the thing that kills you; evidently it’s also the thing that ke
eps you alive. You can inoculate yourself against it, you can rid yourself of it, but then where are you? Not dead, true, but not alive, either; you’ve got rid of the thing inside you that pulls you along toward the end of the line, but don’t you want to go anywhere? Because if you want to go somewhere, the end of the line is the only available destination.
The trees by the side of the road had begun to rustle anxiously, and a peal of thunder tore open the sky, exposing a jagged edge of lightning. When the sky went black again, it was as if a fissure in the earth had been revealed.
On one side of the chasm was the house with the architect and the restaurateur and their wives, and Rosie’s school friends, and the others in her office, and stadiums full of people, and the students traveling in packs through Europe—all the people in the world, in fact, studying and working and playing sports and having colds and running errands and doing whatever it is humans do. And on the other was Rosie, sitting in her little bathroom, cleaning her syringe. All those people rushing around, but they can’t touch Rosie. Their awful thoughts and desires, their disdain, their demands—nothing coming from them can stain or damage Rosie; she never changes, never gets older, just dries out into nothing as she cleans her syringe in a glass of pure spring water.
Poor Ian—how could he ever have expected to protect her when he couldn’t begin to protect even himself? In just one instant that evening Rosie had been shown both of them with perfect clarity.
“Look at that,” he said, as water poured from the sky. “Just what we need.”
If he’d actually cared about her he wouldn’t have taken her along to meet those people. At least, not in the condition she happened to be in. Because by the time you see there’s a decision to be made, you can be pretty sure it’s a decision you already have made.
Rosie thinks so often these days of people, children, who have had to leave the country where they live. What it must be, that last morning, pressing every detail into your brain to preserve it on your long journey—the journey that’s going to last for the rest of your life. The color of the light that day, or the feel of the air, a certain little shrub in the park you always pass on your way home from school, the tender little waves that reach out for the boat as you embark—all those precious things which once breathed and lived in your casual attention, no better than powdery old petals pressed in a book: you’ve left your country for good.
That last night, proceeding through her bedtime ritual as always, she thought at every step: This. And this. Her cup of good cappuccino sat in front of her, and the rubbing alcohol, and the glass of Evian water. Her hairbrush was waiting, and the clean, clean sheets.
Opening the white-paper bindle; pouring, more carefully than ever, the contents into her silver spoon; drawing the water all the way up into the syringe and discharging it gently over the pure white powder. The match bursting into flame, the softly boiling solution, the needle pointing heavenward to coax the air bubble up and out, the bubble moving higher, higher…the precious liquid glittering for a moment at the tip. The rubber around her arm, good and tight, the pumped vein rising, the seeking needle, the stunning penetration, the drop of hungry blood, released to commune in a faint whorl with the contents of the barrel and plunge back into her body, step by teasing step: the first floating radiance with its delicious burn, the second, and, finally, the third, lighting up the splendid corridors.
After swabbing the site of the injection and sluicing the pure water through the syringe, she put the cap on the bright point for good. She brushed her hair over and over. watching her reflection, went into the bedroom, and lay down to sleep, as if on a bier.
In the morning, Ian gave her a little kiss, checked his E-mail, and went out on rounds.
Rosie had planned well; she’d contacted Jamie, checked schedules, looked at maps, and so on, but it came on quickly, the outrage of her body. It was as if she’d swallowed in her sleep a sleeping bird that awoke, then panicked, and by the middle of the day all those plans of hers were rearing up in shivering columns, swaying and crashing back down. Could her hands actually have been shaking the way she saw them shake? And what on earth was happening with her legs!
How did she get out that afternoon? Practically crawling, through the air’s hammer blows and sirens, her vision all fretted and dazzled, falling away in glaring planes, past the razor-sharp, poison-colored blades of grass growing by the house…
How far was her foot from the step, the step from the ground? How big was the doorknob? She’d had to jam her things into the duffel with her fist. In the cab to the station, for all she knows she was screaming.
She was a reverse pioneer. The train brought her in from the western edge, steaming east toward the plains. The settled territories flickered by the window like film, into oblivion, as the vacuum of Rosie’s brain stripped off the names of the towns, and then the towns themselves.
She stopped for some days, as she’d planned, to let the worst of it come up and drain away before she presented herself to Jamie. Not much she remembers about that: a room up some stairs, stumbling down to get Cokes, or once in a while, when the nausea gave over a bit, a sandwich; cold sweats in sheets that absorbed nothing and slid around on the mattress.
The configuration of wrinkles on the sheet, the untied shoelace of the waiter downstairs in the coffee shop, the little stain on the plastic lid of her Coke, the sickle of dust on the bureau, echoing the curve of the ice bucket—details hung at the forefront of her attention, like inadequately assimilated commands. In the halls, the Asian maids congregated by their filthy canvas bins full of used linens, talking for hour after hour in a cool, rippling language that blended with the noise of machines working on the pavement outside and of the televisions in the nearby rooms. Sometimes it seemed to Rosie that she could almost understand, that if she could only assemble the elements of her brain properly…and then sometimes a slippery phosphorescence would irradiate the sounds, and she did understand: they were whispering stories, complicated, tiresome, and interminable, about talking animals, underground kingdoms…
One morning, she woke up to silence. The thrashing wings inside her had drawn back, folding into a painful little lump in the region of her lungs. She stood looking at the long mirror in the thin sunshine that came through the window. Well, well; so this is what the person who had risen from the bed looked like—skim-milk pale, much younger than she really is. The drug-becalmed marble glow of her skin has moderated into a petal-like softness, as if she’d just been born. Her body is thin, unmuscular, childish—unmarked except for the raised, red dots on her arm.
How had she ever had the nerve to call Jamie, she wonders. She wouldn’t have it now. Fortunately, though, at the time she’d been desperate; fortunately, she hadn’t been thinking clearly. And who else could she have called, anyway—Mona McCauley? With her house and her husband and her dog and her child? Lexi Feld?
Jamie was two years older, and he had been kind, all through school. It had been obvious that he’d be going on to college and obvious that Rosie wouldn’t; God knows, her mother had never had that kind of money, and, assuming her father did, it would go, presumably, to his younger children, wherever. So there’d always been plenty of differences between her and Jamie, but there are differences which when you’re young, she thinks, run all up and down your life that you still assume are just incidental.
After school, Jamie had gone on to college, and then to art school, and by then Rosie had pretty much lost track of him. Bits of news came back, through one person or another. Jamie was still painting. But not (people were quick to point out) making any money at it. And there was Vincent. Who moved in, and, fairly recently, had moved out.
With every phone call Rosie had made to trace Jamie, it became more of a certainty that she really was going to leave. But leaving was one thing, she realized when the taxi let her out at a real house, and she rang the real bell of Jamie’s apartment, and she walked up the two flights of real steps, and arriving was another.
&n
bsp; Of course you could forget about your past, but then—how funny—there’s someone on your doorstep ten years later: Hey, didn’t you drop something? She and Jamie looked at each other as if they were studying a map, an aerial map of all the years that the mirror Rosie had studied earlier was not able to see.
In the morning, Rosie awoke in a dark-blue room. She was in Jamie’s apartment. Yes, and the room, obviously, must have been Vincent’s. There was nothing in it except a bed, a light, and a painting. A door opened into a small closet with a few shelves and a place to hang some clothes. Rosie has since noted that the painting is the only one in the apartment. It’s by Jamie; this she knows from the signature. Most likely, it was a gift to Vincent.
Rosie paused in the kitchen doorway. Jamie was sitting at the table, beyond a pillar of dusty light, drinking coffee, and just staring out. He was wearing a heavy kimono—faded red silk, covered with designs of clouds and birds.
Impossible: Her ten-years-later self, in underpants and a tank top, standing at the door of a place that’s Jamie’s kitchen. But maybe that’s what life is always like. All the time, for everyone. Maybe any moment you could say, this is normal; it’s just what’s happening. And you could equally well say, this is the strangest thing that ever could be. Probably so—it’ll just depend on where you start the story.
All Around Atlantis Page 11