Her fit lasts three, maybe four minutes. Anna decides to find her mother, but as she stands she knocks over a tray of heirloom tomatoes. They roll across the pavement, strange-hued fruits of purple and yellow and green, colors that tomatoes have no right being. How angry Anna is suddenly, at this, and everything else. A woman blunders and steps on one of the tomatoes, others are being squashed under the wheels of baby strollers. It looks like a battleground on which dozens of tiny slaughters had been perpetrated. Anna’s mother appears, embarrassed. She tries to force money on the farmer, who is kindly refusing payment. “These things happen,” he says. “Take care of the little girl.” He means Anna, who has turned her back, the hood of her Stanford sweatshirt tight over her head.
“Oh, Annie,” says her mother, and leads Anna away from the crowd, away from the market. “Oh Annie.”
Anna takes a bag of basil and a sack of apples from her mother without looking at her. Her hands brush against the basil leaves, releasing their sharp pungent aroma. Anna barely notices. She yearns for something, something she believes her mother can give her. She is also terrified. Unable to articulate either her need or her terror, she treads heavily after her mother, her head held low to keep the sun’s rays off her face. Her sweatshirt is insufferably hot, but she doesn’t dare remove it. That would mean exposure, and shame so fiery it would singe her insides. Her mother is too far away. Her mother is too near to her. Within reach of her fingers if she, Anna, reached out with her free hand. She could touch that shoulder, caress its petite, fragile bones, send a message. Somehow that is the most chilling thought of all.
Because the bags are heavy, Anna’s mother leads her toward the forbidden shortcut, across the municipal golf course: No pedestrians allowed. The day is windless. Anna’s mother takes off her shoes, puts them in a bag on top of some broccoli.
“When I was pregnant with you, I played the wrong music.” Anna’s mother is talking as if they had been in the middle of a conversation. “They tell you that Mozart will make your child smart and happy, but I was just discovering the Impressionists then, was bored with Mozart. I riled you up with my choices. I could feel you churning inside me. Agitating. At the time I thought it was a good thing, I was educating your ears, stimulating you. But when you came out, you looked so sad. Can a baby look sad? You did. I was sad, too. So sad it was over. We’d been so close. And now I had to share you.”
Her mother has never talked to her like this before. Anna is startled. Sweat is trickling down her back, between her breasts, but still she keeps her sweatshirt zipped, the hood over her head. She doesn’t trust her voice to respond. She slows her steps to increase the distance between herself and her mother. It’s safer that way.
“I tried golfing once,” her mother says, seemingly apropos of nothing. Then Anna sees two elderly men playing on the ninth hole. Anna and her mother guiltily skirt to the left, around a grove of fir trees. They’ve frequently taken this forbidden path. Sometimes clubs are shaken at them, once a ball was thrown. The heat is making them both somnolent, how they keep walking is a miracle. Anna has a thirsty ache in her throat. Dr. Cummings blames the medications, but Anna knows that’s impossible. Her thirst is due to something else, something deep that is insatiable.
Anna stumbles in the grass because she’s not lifting her feet high enough.
“At least take your shoes off,” her mother says, and when she does, Anna is surprised at how pleasantly cool the grass is. They run into trouble at the sixth hole, where two middle-aged women stare icily at the friendly wave Anna’s mother gives.
One hundred feet farther, they stop to rest under an oak tree that must be two hundred years old—it is massive, with far-reaching limbs.
“You don’t know what a huge presence you are in our lives,” her mother says, again as if picking up a conversation in progress. “Even if you’re in your room with the door closed, we can feel you.”
To this Anna has no answer. There are no answers.
“Oh Annie,” her mother says finally, not looking at her. “Do you see any way out of this?” Anna’s mother is sitting with her back against the tree, is picking blades of grass and shredding them. To which Anna says nothing. She sits about four feet from her mother. She uncrosses and extends her legs, lies back on the grass. She could almost go to sleep. The heavy summer air.
Then suddenly the sprinklers go on. Anna’s skin is so hot she can almost hear the sizzle as the cold water kisses her face, her hands, her feet. It’s such a fine mist that it isn’t uncomfortable, is welcome, even. Anna’s mother gives a little cry of happiness, and moving away from the tree, stretches out on the grass, her arms opened wide, her hair spread around her head. Drops sparkle on the dark strands.
Her mother begins humming. Anna doesn’t recognize the tune, but it is haunting and dissonant. It doesn’t match the bright day. It is more in line with Anna’s mood than anything she has ever heard. An appropriate soundtrack to her inner life. Then her mother starts singing the words. Anna doesn’t understand German, but she recognizes the syllables of misery.
Nun will die Sonn’ so hell aufgeh’n
als sei kein Unglück die Nacht gescheh’n.
Anna’s mother stops. She’s lying motionless, staring straight up at the sky, not smiling.
“What is that?”
“Mahler. Kindertotenlieder.”
“What does that mean?”
“Songs on the Deaths of Children.”
“And the words?”
Her mother hesitates. “I can only approximate,” she says.
Anna waits.
When she sees that Anna is going to persist, her mother gives in.
Now the sun wants to rise as brightly
as if nothing terrible had happened during the night.
“Yes,” says Anna.
“What?” asks her mother.
“That’s it. He got it. He got it right.”
Her mother suddenly sits up, startling Anna.
“Oh, Annie,” she says once more, “we’re not going to lose you, are we?” She reaches over and puts her hand on Anna’s shoulder. It weighs heavily there.
“To say you are precious to us is such an understatement,” Anna’s mother says. Her eyes are dry but Anna knows how that can be, how the heat of emotion can scorch your tear ducts, cause any moisture to evaporate.
Her mother pulls away. “I realize I’m taking a risk by saying this. I realize that simply saying these words out loud is dangerous. So Dr. Cummings warns. Not to put any ideas in your head.”
Anna doesn’t answer. She thinks she would like the pain to stop. She thinks she will stop the pain, eventually. For I am passionately in love with death.
What surprises Anna is the anger. It comes in flashes, at times when she has a plausible weapon in her hand. A dissecting knife in the biology lab. The steering wheel of a car. She’d only had her license two months when she entered the darkness. She is truly dangerous on the road. Her parents don’t understand or they would forbid her the car keys. Instead, they encourage her to take the car out, encourage anything that will take her away from her bed. Sometimes Anna just drives around and around the block, for twenty, thirty minutes, her anger steadily mounting.
“Are we going to lose you?” Anna’s mother asks again, and her voice quavers.
You already have, thinks Anna.
PART II
Revelation
8
ANNA WASN’T THE ONLY PERSON on her street living in self-exile that year. Not the only person hiding from the sun and eschewing human contact. Anna would catch a glimpse sometimes from her bedroom window. She’d have to wait. She’d have to be patient. Then there he’d be. Jim Fulson, in C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E. Former football star. He had ridden off victorious to UCLA six years ago amidst a virtual parade of admirers, but returned home without fanfare five years later in apparent disgrace, taking up residen
ce in his parents’ rec room. A shadow. Anna would see him mowing the lawn by moonlight, or on a ladder after dark fixing something on the roof, an electric lantern hanging from the chimney.
While waiting at the bus stop, in front of C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E, Anna studies the windows of the rec room, tries to catch a glimpse of Jim Fulson, some sign of life. Occasionally, a flicker behind the curtain. On a rare foggy day, a dull light shines through. Usually nothing. But she has a feeling. She doesn’t like turning her back on C-A-R-O-L-I-N-E. Whatever happens, whenever it happens, she wants to know. She wants to bear witness.
Anna’s neighborhood has never been chummy, so no one knows Jim Fulson’s complete story. No one gossips over fences. No one organizes block parties or jumbo garage sales. Nothing ever brings the longtime residents together except a common loathing of the foul Hendersons, a childless couple who live down the block from Anna. They snobbishly refuse to speak to the newer residents, who spend their weekends stripping houses down to wooden skeletons and then layering only the most eco-friendly and luxurious amenities on top. Huge bamboo forests now separate houses, the traditional metal chain-link fencing long gone, and the older iron swing sets replaced by brightly colored molded plastic play modules.
Then, in February of Anna’s junior year of high school, the Goldschmidts move in next door. Lars, a pale fifteen-year-old, his mother and father. They are different from the beginning. For starters, they bring so little with them. They don’t even use a moving van. Instead, they drive up in their Honda Civic, followed by a battered truck that spits out a few pieces of furniture and boxes of kitchen stuff onto the lawn. Some of the items sit for hours before gradually being hauled inside, so the neighbors grow intimate with the Goldschmidts’ possessions long before meeting them. Salvation Army–quality mismatched chairs and a plastic table. Mattresses, but as far as the neighbors can tell, no bed frames. The one couch and two armchairs are carried into the living room. The Goldschmidts hadn’t bothered to pack their clothes—they possess so few they had simply thrown them into the back of their own small car. The wardrobes of three people wouldn’t even fill a single bedroom closet. There are no curtains. They simply pin up bedsheets their first night in the house.
Both the Goldschmidts work. They leave the house at 8 am, nod to the other neighbors as they get into their Civic and drive off each morning. Professional jobs, if you judged by their attire. He in pressed trousers, a long-sleeved white shirt and tie, she in a skirt—always a skirt, never pants—with a neutral-colored blouse and black blazer or sweater. Anna’s mother points out that Mrs. Goldschmidt possesses exactly three skirts, two blouses, and one pair of black shoes. “She just mixes and matches them very cleverly,” Anna’s mother tells Anna.
Even before meeting the Goldschmidts, the neighbors know something is off. No sign of a television. At night you can only see the glow of lamps through the sheets, the shadows of Lars and his parents as they move from one room to the next. They turn their lights off early. Before 9 pm. And then on again early while it is still dark, before anyone else on the street wakes. Except Anna, of course. She watches their shadows in the predawn darkness and feels a small pinprick of interest. The Goldschmidts and Jim Fulson. The only solid objects to permeate the fortress of pain she inhabits.
9
MORE THAN TWO MONTHS PASS before Anna makes contact with the Goldschmidts. A Tuesday morning. A beautiful spring day in Northern California. Like everything else, it oppresses Anna. For I am passionately in love with death. She still exists. She has taken no action over these long months. She is a coward after all.
Anna did get out of bed this morning. She did put on clothes. She did urinate. She did not brush her teeth. She did not floss. She did not look in the mirror. She did approach the breakfast table when her mother called. She did not eat. Her mother dragged a comb through her hair as Anna sat in front of a bowl of Cheerios and milk, then pushed her out the door at 8:02, only to run after Anna to stuff lunch money that won’t be used into the pocket of her jeans.
Anna is standing at the bus stop. The bus is late. The only other person waiting is Lars Goldschmidt. Anna knows him only by sight. Although they’ve stood here together every morning since he moved in next door, they’ve never exchanged a word.
Nothing is different. Nothing has changed from yesterday, or the day before. Yet Anna finds herself examining Lars’s slight frame and refined features, allowing herself to really see him for the first time. She’s surprised to be interested. She admires his fastidiousness, his delicacy. His wrists are so thin she could snap them between her thumb and forefinger. Her fingers itch to try.
Then he lifts his face to look directly into hers. Anna wants to avoid his gaze, but finds she cannot. At 5’9”, she’s at least four inches taller, and, at 135 pounds, perhaps a third again as heavy as him. A bruiser, in comparison. Lars begins speaking, but Anna doesn’t catch his meaning. She shakes her head.
Lars repeats his words.
“I said, how long do we wait when the bus is late? Before we assume it isn’t coming?”
His voice is deeper than expected. Such manly tones from this hollow shell of a boy. He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands. They dangle awkwardly at his side. Then he lifts them and carefully adjusts a strand of longish darkish hair infringing on his eyes. He pauses, moves it another millimeter to the left. He tightens a strap on his backpack. Such fussy conscientiousness. Anna feels a twinge. He is so pitifully small. Anna has overheard things in school about what is happening in the locker room and before and after classes, just outside of teachers’ sight lines: ugly names, punches, pummelings, taunts. Yet Lars always emerges with an air of calm equanimity. No sign of anxiety or resentment. Anna admires such resilience, such apparent invulnerability of the spirit, however bruised the flesh might be.
“If the bus hasn’t arrived by now, it’s not coming,” Anna says. “Time to consider alternate transportation.”
Her voice comes out louder and harsher than she intends. Lars has already forced her to break two of her self-imposed rules. No direct eye contact. No speech except when absolutely necessary.
Lars then asks her a question, but it takes Anna several moments to realize what a strange question it is.
“Do you want to go to church with us?”
“What?” she asks him.
He smiles. “Church,” he says. “I think you might like it.” His voice has real warmth, so at odds with the rest of his cold shrimplike self. Has the sun ever fingered his pale flesh?
“I don’t go to church,” Anna says. “We never have.”
He waits to see if she is going to say anything else. “I think you’d like it,” he repeats. “I think you’d be surprised.” He pauses. “You have much to offer.” And then, oddly: “We could use you.”
Use Anna, this lump of useless meat? She has nothing to say to that. She turns back toward her house, to ask her mother for a ride to school. But before Anna can take a step, Lars begins speaking once more. Anna doesn’t, can’t, take in the substance of his words. Yet somehow she hears him and her body thrills.
“And I looked, and behold a pale horse.”
“What did you say?” Anna asks. She stops trying to move away from Lars. She is caught by the terrible, wonderful image that his words evoke. She remembers the phrase from Revelation, the pale horse, ghostly animal, bone thin, its limbs and head improbably stretched. “What did you say?” she repeats. She wants to hear him say the words again in his electrifying voice.
“Its rider was named Death.”
Anna has seen that rider. That rider is always in Anna’s mind. Tall and fierce, her body as elongated as her horse’s, as ghostly white. Her hair long and streaming behind. She holds a small child, as fair as she, on her lap. Her arms tight around the child’s waist. Both are naked.
Incredibly, then, Lars laughs, such a contagious burst of genuine animal noise that Anna almost laugh
s, too. She stops herself. She is suddenly aware of the stillness of the morning street. All who work have left for work. Schoolchildren have saddled bikes and pedaled off. Younger ones have been strapped into cars and driven to playgroups. The park at the end of the Street of Children’s Names will not start to fill for another hour. They are alone. Lars is telling Anna secrets. He is telling her things she already knows.
“And power was given unto them,” Lars says, “over the fourth part of the earth, to kill . . .”
Coming of Age at the End of Days Page 3