The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  “This,” Raj says, counting checks. “This is the stuff.”

  “We can’t stay here much longer,” says Klara. They’re parked illegally behind a boarded-up Burger King because Raj doesn’t want to pay rent in an RV park.

  “Nobody knows we’re here, baby,” he says. “We’re invisible.”

  • • •

  The seasons are all wrong. When she calls home during Hanukkah, huddled over the car phone while Raj is at Stop ’n Save, it’s snowing in New York and eighty-six degrees in the RV.

  “How are you doing?” Daniel asks, and it shocks her how much she misses him. When he visited San Francisco, she watched him play peekaboo with Ruby and imagined him for the first time as a father.

  “I’m good,” she says, faking sparkle, faking shine. “I’m fine.”

  Klara has kept two things from her siblings: the knocks, and the fact that Simon’s death aligned with his prophecy. Simon never shared his date with Varya and Daniel, and they haven’t discussed the woman on Hester Street since Saul’s shiva. But the knowledge festers inside Klara. After shows, taking off her makeup while Raj collects tips, she calculates how long she’ll live if the woman was right about her, too.

  I’m not going to die, she told Simon. I refuse to.

  It was easier for her to adopt that swagger until the woman’s first prediction came true. When Simon died, Klara careened back to the age of nine, back to the doorstep of the apartment on Hester Street. In truth, she hadn’t wanted to know her date of death, not really. She’d only wanted to meet the woman.

  She had never heard of a female magician. (“Why are there so few of us?” she asked Ilya once. “For one thing,” he said, “the Inquisition. For two more, the Reformation and the Salem Witch Trials. What’s more, the clothing. You ever try to hide a dove in an evening gown?”) When Klara entered the apartment, the woman was standing against the window. She wore her hair in two long, brown braids, which made her face look symmetrical and complete. Years later, Klara cut class to wander through the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There she saw a statue representing the head of Janus, on loan from the Vatican Museum, and thought of the fortune teller. The statue’s faces stared in different directions, representing the past and the present, but this didn’t make the figure look disjointed; instead, it had a circular coherence. Klara only resented that the statue portrayed Janus—god of beginnings as well as transitions and time—as a man.

  “Wow.” Klara gazed at the charts and calendars, the I Ching and fortune sticks, in the woman’s apartment. “You know how to use all these things?”

  To Klara’s surprise, the woman shook her head.

  “That stuff’s for show,” she said. “The people who come here? They like to think I know things for a reason. So I got props.”

  When she walked toward Klara, her body had the power and electricity of a moving vehicle. Klara nearly stepped aside, but no: she steeled herself, held her ground.

  “The props make everybody feel better,” said the woman. “But I don’t need nothing like that.”

  “You just know,” Klara whispered.

  The gap between their bodies was as charged as the space between two magnets. Klara felt faint, as though she’d float into the woman’s arms if she let herself relax.

  “I just know,” said the woman. She tucked her chin, cocked her head and looked at Klara, slant. “Like you.”

  Like you: it felt like proof of existence. Klara wanted more. She hadn’t thought she cared to know her date of death, but now she was entranced. She wanted to linger longer in the woman’s spell, a spell in which, like a mirror, Klara saw herself. She asked for her fortune.

  When the woman replied, the spell broke.

  Klara felt as though she’d been smacked. She can’t remember whether she thanked the woman or how she made her way into the alley. She was simply there, her face streaked and her palms caked brown by the dirt on the railing of the fire escape.

  Thirteen years later, the woman was right about Simon, just as Klara had feared. But this is the problem: was the woman as powerful as she seemed, or did Klara take steps that made the prophecy come true? Which would be worse? If Simon’s death was preventable, a fraud, then Klara is at fault—and perhaps she’s a fraud, too. After all, if magic exists alongside reality—two faces gazing in different directions, like the head of Janus—then Klara can’t be the only one able to access it. If she doubts the woman, then she has to doubt herself. And if she doubts herself, she must doubt everything she believes, including Simon’s knocks.

  What she needs is proof. In May 1990, on a warm night when Raj and Ruby are asleep, Klara sits up in bed.

  She should time them, like she does in Second Sight. One minute per letter.

  She stands and walks to the kitchen booth on which she’s left Simon’s watch—a gift from Saul, leather banded with a small gold face. She sits in the cab, where there’s enough moonlight to see the ticking of its slender second hand.

  “Come on, Sy,” she whispers.

  When the first knock comes, she starts timing. Seven minutes pass, then eight—twelve when a knock sounds again.

  M.

  She stares at the watch like it’s a key, like it’s Simon’s grinning face. The next knock comes five minutes later: E.

  Ruby whimpers.

  Not now, Klara thinks. Please, not now. But the whimper becomes a warble and then Ruby’s cry breaks through like dawn. Klara hears Raj climb out of bed, hears him murmur until the baby’s only sniffling, and then they appear in the cab.

  “What are you doing?”

  He holds Ruby high on his chest, so that her head is aligned with his. Their eyes loom in the dark.

  “Nothing. I couldn’t sleep.”

  Raj bounces Ruby. “Why not?”

  “How should I know?”

  He lifts his free hand—just asking—and recedes into the darkness. She hears him set Ruby down in her crib.

  “Raj.” She faces forward to stare at the nailed-over door of the Burger King. “I’m not happy.”

  “I know.” He comes to sit in the passenger seat and scoots the chair back until his legs can stretch forward. He wears his hair in a ponytail—it’s been days since he washed it—and his eyes are watery with exhaustion.

  “I never wanted this for us. I wanted something better. I still do. For her.” Raj jerks his chin at Ruby’s crib. “I want her to have a house. I want her to have neighbors. I want her to have a fucking puppy, if that’s what she wants. But puppies aren’t cheap. Neither are neighbors. I’m trying to save, Klara, but what we’re making? It’s better than it was, but it’s not nearly enough.”

  “Maybe this is as far as we go.” Klara’s voice is uneven. “I’m tired. I know you are, too. Maybe it’s time we both got real jobs.”

  Raj snorts. “I dropped out of high school. You never did college. You think Microsoft’ll want us?”

  “Not Microsoft. Someplace else. Or we could go back to school. I’ve always been good at math; I could do an accounting course. And you—as a mechanic, you were talented. You were brilliant.”

  “So were you!” bursts Raj. “You were talented. You were brilliant. First time I saw you, Klara, that little show in North Beach, I looked at you onstage and I thought: That woman. She’s different. Your dreams were too big and your hair was too long, it kept getting tangled in the ropes, but you spun at the ceiling like nothing I’d seen and I thought you might never come down. I’m not ready to give up. And I don’t think you are, either. You really want to settle down? Get a job shuffling papers or working with other people’s money?”

  His speech moves her in deep, buried ways. Klara has always known she’s meant to be a bridge: between reality and illusion, the present and the past, this world and the next. She just has to figure out how.

  “Okay,” she says, slowly. “But we
can’t keep going on like this.”

  “No. We can’t.” Raj’s eyes bore straight ahead. “We need to think bigger.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like Vegas.”

  “Raj.” Klara presses her palms into her eye sockets. “I told you.”

  “I know you did.” Raj shifts in his seat and leans toward her over the armrest. “But you want an audience, you want impact—you want to be known, Klara, and you can’t be known here. But people come from all over to visit Vegas, looking for something they can’t get at home.”

  “Money.”

  “No—entertainment. They want to break the rules, turn the world on its head. And isn’t that what you want? Isn’t that what you do?” He grabs her hand. “Look. I never wanted to be the star. You never wanted to be the assistant. You’ve always felt you were meant to do something great, something better than this, right? And I’ve always believed in you.”

  “I’m not like that anymore. Something’s gone. I’m weaker.”

  “You’ve been doing better since you stopped drinking. You’re only weak when you get into your head, when you get stuck down there and can’t climb out. You have to stay up here,” he says, holding his hand flat under his chin. “Above water. Focus on what’s real, like Ruby. And your career.”

  When Klara thinks of Ruby, it’s like trying to hold on to a rock in the middle of a river, like trying to cling to something small and hard while everything is pulling her away.

  “If we go to Vegas,” she says, “and I can’t do it. If we don’t get hired. Or if I . . . if I just can’t. What then?”

  “I don’t think that way,” Raj says. “And neither should you.”

  • • •

  Vegas,” says Gertie. “You’re going to Vegas.”

  Klara hears her mother’s hand muffling the receiver. Then she hears her shouting.

  “Varya, did you hear me? Vegas. She’s going to Vegas is what she said.”

  “Ma,” says Klara. “I can hear you.”

  “What?”

  “It’s my choice.”

  “No one said it isn’t. It certainly wouldn’t be mine.”

  There is the click of another receiver being picked up.

  “You’re going to Vegas?” Varya asks. “For what? A vacation? Are you bringing Ruby?”

  “Of course we’re bringing Ruby. What else would we do with her? And not for a vacation—for good.”

  Klara looks out the window of the RV. Raj is pacing while he smokes. Every few seconds, he glances at Klara to see if she’s still on the phone.

  “Why?” asks Varya, aghast.

  “Because I want to be a magician. And that’s where you have to be if you want to be a magician—if you want to make money doing it. And besides, V, I have a kid; you don’t know how expensive that is. Ruby’s food, her diapers, her clothes—”

  “I raised four children,” says Gertie. “And I never once went to Vegas.”

  “We know,” says Klara. “I’m different.”

  “We know.” Varya sighs. “If you’re happy.”

  Raj is walking back to the car before she’s put the phone back in its cradle.

  “What’d they say?” he asks, swinging into the driver’s seat, putting his key in the ignition. “Disapprove?”

  “Yup.”

  “I know they’re your family,” he says, veering onto the road. “But if they weren’t, you wouldn’t like them, either.”

  • • •

  They stop in a campground in Hesperia to sleep. Klara wakes to the sound of Raj’s voice. She turns over and squints at Saul’s watch: three fifteen in the morning and Raj is sitting next to Ruby’s crib. He’s peering at her through the bars, whispering about Dharavi.

  Sheet metal painted bright blue. Women selling sugarcane. Houses with walls made of jute bags; enormous pipes that rise, like the backs of elephants, in the streets. He tells her about the electricity goons and the mangrove swamp, the shanty where he was born.

  “That’s Tata’s house. Half of it was demolished when I was a kid. The other half is probably gone by now, too. But we can picture it that way. Picture the half still standing,” he says. “Each floor is a business. On Tata’s floor are glass bottles and plastic and metal parts. On the next floor up there are men building furniture; on the one above that, they’re making leather briefcases and handbags. On the top floor are women stitching tiny blue jeans and T-shirts, clothing for children like you.”

  Ruby coos and waves a hand, bluish white in the moonlight. Raj takes it.

  “They say that your people are untouchable, worse than the ones who came from beneath Brahma’s feet. But your people are workers. Your people are shopkeepers and farmers and repairmen. In the villages, they aren’t allowed to enter temples or shrines. But Dharavi is their temple,” he says. “And America is ours.”

  Klara’s head is turned toward the crib, but her body is rigid. Raj has never spoken of such things to her before. When she asks him about Dharavi, or the insurgency in Kashmir, he changes the subject.

  “Your tata would be proud of you,” Raj says. “And you should be proud of him.”

  Raj stands. Klara presses her cheek to the pillow.

  “Don’t forget it, Ruby,” he says, pulling the blanket up to her chin. “Don’t forget.”

  16.

  In Vegas, they stop in an RV park called King’s Row. It’s fifteen minutes from the strip and costs two hundred dollars a month, which Raj hands over resentfully, because the pool has been drained and all the laundry machines except one are broken. “It’s just for now,” he tells Ruby, kissing her button mushroom nose. “We’ll sell this thing soon.” While he levels the rig with electric jacks and hooks up the utilities, Klara explores the grounds. There’s a rec room with a ping-pong table and a half-empty vending machine. The RVs seem to have been anchored for months, with wooden decks on which residents have placed potted plants or American flags.

  They get a long-term car rental, three months with an ’82 Pontiac Sunbird, and drive to the Strip. Klara has never seen anything like it. Waterfalls that never dry. Tropical flowers in constant bloom. The resort hotels are metallic and angular as space stations. “Live hot girls,” someone hisses, and a postcard materializes in Klara’s hand. Gods parade in front of Caesars; a woman lies facedown on the side of the street, her head on a pink leather pocketbook. Showgirls and fake Elvises stand beside a live Chucky doll that waves to Klara with its knife-wielding hand.

  The newest hotel rises up like an open book, two slender buildings connected at the binding. The Mirage is written on an electronic sign in curling, red capitals. It scrolls: In our first ten hours we paid the largest single jackpot in Las Vegas history! 4.6 million! Enjoy the buffet! Then the letters vanish, coy, and The Mirage reappears. A volcano in front of the hotel fires nightly, they’re told, to the sound of the Grateful Dead and the Indian tabla player Zakir Hussain. There’s an atrium with a man-made rainforest and an enclosure for real tigers. It’s exactly what Klara’s always never wanted, but she thinks of Ruby. There’s money here. They walk into the lobby, which is hung with giant chandeliers and glass petals the size of car tires. Behind the front desk, stretching from floor to ceiling, is an aquarium fifty feet wide. She hears a shrill roar, which she thinks is the waterfall or the volcano before she recognizes it for a saw: the building is still under construction.

  “Psst,” says Raj. He points to a large banner above the front desk. It shows Siegfried and Roy, their faces pressed to either side of a white tiger. Daily at 1 and 7 p.m. It’s 1:45. They follow the signs to the theater. Since the show has already begun, there’s no ticketer. Raj slips through the door with Ruby on his hip and pulls Klara into two empty seats. Siegfried and Roy are dressed in unbuttoned silk shirts, cropped fur jackets, and leather pants with codpieces. They ride a fire-breathing mechanical dragon, whipping the te
n-foot head while women in shell bikinis dance with crystal-headed staffs. At the end of the show, Roy sits on top of a white tiger that sits on top of a mirrored disco ball. Joined by Siegfried and twelve more exotic animals, they levitate into the rafters.

  It’s a garbled American dream, a dream of the American dream: forty years earlier, the pair met aboard an ocean liner and fled postwar Germany with a cheetah stowed in their trunk. Now their show has a cast and crew of two hundred and fifty people.

  As the men bow, Raj puts his mouth to Klara’s ear. “We just have to find a way in. Somebody’s gotta know somebody,” he says.

  • • •

  Klara breast-feeds Ruby on the futon, keeping one eye on Simon’s watch. The same two letters appear as before: M, then E. Five minutes later, there’s a second E. The next span of time is so long—twenty minutes—that she’s worried she missed something while burping Ruby. Then she hears the noise again.

  T.

  “Meet!”

  Ruby shrieks. Klara’s milk is running dry.

  “What?” calls Raj from outside. He’s belly-up under the RV, looking at the backboard.

  “Nothing,” Klara says. Raj won’t want to hear what’s just occurred to her, which is this: If Simon is communicating with her from beyond the lip of death, then who’s to say Saul isn’t, too?

  Klara clasps her nursing bra and shushes the baby, but there’s an ache in her sinuses like she might start crying. Ruby is alive, and Ruby needs her. Klara needs Simon, needs Saul, but they’re—