The Immortalists

by Chloe Benjamin

  The Ludlow Falls are almost two stories tall, roaring. An old stairway leads at least thirty feet into the gorge, to a pathway skirting the river and lit only by moonlight.

  He descends slowly at first, then faster as he adjusts to the width and tempo of the steps.

  The gorge is jagged, more difficult to navigate. His coat keeps catching on branches, and he trips twice over gnarled roots. Why did he think this was a good idea? The gorge is too narrow to accommodate a motor home, the entrance too steep. He keeps walking, hoping to find another staircase or a trail that leads to higher ground, but his anticipation soon turns to fatigue. At one point, he slips on a slick ledge of sheet rock and has to drop to all fours to avoid falling into the river.

  His hands scrabble over moss and stone. The knees of his slacks are soaked through; his heartbeat has dropped to his stomach and settled there, wrongly. There’s still time for him to turn around. He could rent a motel room, clean up, and arrive home by morning, telling Mira he fell asleep at the office. She might be perturbed, but she would believe him. Above all, he is loyal.

  Instead, he peels himself carefully off of the rock, rising to his knees and then to stand. He finds better traction farther from the water, where the underbrush is dry. As the gorge narrows, it begins to rise. He’s not sure how much time has passed when he notices that the falls have become distant. He must have walked around them, to the south side.

  Daniel sees flatter land above. He stumbles more quickly, grabbing tree trunks and low branches to help pull himself out of the gorge. As he climbs, straining his eyes in the dark, he notices that part of the clearing is blocked by something angular. Rectangular.

  A motor home is parked in a patch of flat land beneath dense trees. By the time he reaches the upper lip of the gorge, he’s out of breath, but he feels like he could do the climb twice over. The trailer is speckled with mud. Snow clumps on the roof. The windows are covered, and the word Regatta is written in slanting script across the side.

  • • •

  He’s surprised to find the door unlocked. He mounts the stairs and steps inside.

  A moment before his eyes adjust to the dark. It’s difficult to see with the windows covered, but the basic layout is discernible. He stands in a cramped living area, his left knee touching a dingy couch in a terrible abstract pattern. There’s a table across from the couch, or barely a table—a surface that folds out from the wall, currently stacked with boxes. Two metal folding chairs are wedged between the table and the front seats, also covered with boxes. To the left of the table is a sink and another strip of counter space with an assortment of candles and figurines.

  He walks farther into the trailer, passing a spare, cramped bathroom before he comes to a closed door. In the center of the door, at eye level, a wooden cross hangs from two thumbtacks. He turns the doorknob.

  A twin bed has been pushed up next to the wall. Beside it is a crate with a bible on top, as well as a plate, empty except for a plastic wrapper. Above that is a small, square window. The bed is covered with plaid flannel sheets and a navy blue comforter between which extends a single foot.

  Daniel clears his throat. “Get up.”

  The body stirs. Its face is turned to one side and hidden beneath long tendrils of hair. Slowly, a woman shifts onto her back and opens one eye, then the other. For a moment, she looks at him blankly. Then she inhales sharply and pushes herself to a seated position. She wears a cotton nightgown printed with tiny yellow flowers.

  “I have a gun,” says Daniel. “Get dressed.” Already, he’s disgusted by her. Her foot is bare, the heel rough and cracked. “We’re going to talk.”

  • • •

  He brings her into the living area and tells her to sit on the couch. She carries the navy comforter from the bedroom and keeps it wrapped around her shoulders. Daniel removes the black shades from the windows, so that he can see her better in the moonlight.

  She’s still heavy, though perhaps she looks larger this way, swaddled in the comforter. Her hair is white and unkempt and hangs down to her breasts; her face is covered with delicate, capillary wrinkles, so precise they could be drawn by pencil. The flesh beneath her eyes is a sallow pink.

  “I know you.” Her voice is rusty. “I remember you. You came to see me in New York. You had your siblings, they were there. Two girls and a little boy.”

  “They’re dead. The boy, and one of the girls.”

  The woman’s mouth is pursed. She shifts beneath the comforter.

  “I know your name,” Daniel says. “It’s Bruna Costello. I know your family, and what they’ve done. But I want to know about you. I want to know why you do what you do, and why you did what you did to us.”

  The woman’s mouth is set. “I don’t got nothing to say to you.”

  Daniel takes the gun out from inside his jacket and fires two bullets into the aluminum floor. The woman shrieks and covers her ears; the comforter falls to one side. There’s a scar, white and shiny like dried glue, beneath her collarbone.

  “That’s my home,” she says. “You got no right to do that.”

  “I’ll do worse.” He points the gun at her face, its barrel level with her nose. “So let’s start with the basics. You come from criminals.”

  “I don’t talk about my family.”

  He points upward, fires again. The bullet explodes through the roof and whistles in the air outside. Bruna screams. With one hand, she pulls the comforter up over her shoulders again; she holds the other out straight, her palm facing Daniel like a stop sign.

  “Drabarimos, it’s a gift from God. My family wasn’t using it right. They’re backward, they’re dishonest, they hit and run. I don’t do nothing like that. I talk about life, and God’s blessings.”

  “You know they’re locked up, don’t you? You know they’ve been caught?”

  “I heard. But I don’t talk to them. I got nothing to do with it.”

  “Bullshit. You stick together, you people, like rats.”

  “Not me,” says Bruna. “Not me.”

  When Daniel lowers his gun, she drops her hand. In her eyes, Daniel sees a gloss of tears. Perhaps she’s telling the truth. Perhaps her family feels as remote to her as Klara and Simon and Saul do to Daniel—like part of another lifetime.

  But he can’t become soft. “Is that why you left home?”

  “That’s part.”

  “Why else?”

  “’Cause I was a girl. ’Cause I didn’t wanna be nobody’s wife, nobody’s mother. Starting seven years old, you’re cleaning the house. Eleven, twelve, you’re working; fourteen, married. Me, I wanted to go to school, be a nurse, but I didn’t have no education. All it was was ‘Shai drabarel, shai drabarel?’ Can she tell fortunes. So I ran. I did what I knew, I gave readings. But I says to myself, I’ll be different. No charge if I don’t have to. No witchcrap. There was a client I had for years, I didn’t ask her once to pay me. I says to her, ‘Teach me. Teach me how to read.’ She’s laughing: ‘Palms?’ ‘No,’ I tell her. ‘The newspaper.’”

  Bruna’s mouth quivers. “I’m fifteen,” she says, “living in a motel. I can’t write an advertisement. I can’t read a contract. I’m learning, but I look at what you got to do to be a nurse, college and like that, and here’s me leaving school at seven. I know I can’t do it; I know it’s too late. So I says to myself, Okay, I have the gift—I still have that. Maybe it’s all how I use it.”

  At the end of this monologue, she deflates. He can tell how miserable she is, forced to share it with him.

  “Keep going,” he says.

  Bruna inhales with a wheeze. “I wanted to do something good. So I think, Okay: What do nurses do? They help people, people who suffer. Why do they suffer? ’Cause they don’t know what’s gonna happen to them. So what if I can take that away? If they have answers, they’ll be free, is what I thought. If they know when they’ll die
, they can live.”

  “What do you want from the people who come to you? Not money—so what?”

  “Nothing.” Her eyes bulge.

  “Bullshit. You wanted power. We were kids, and you had us eating out of the palm of your hand.”

  “I didn’t make you come.”

  “You advertised your services.”

  “I did not. You found me.”

  Her face is animated and indignant. Daniel tries to remember if this is true. How did he hear of her? Two boys in a deli. But how did they hear of her? The trail must lead back to Bruna.

  “Even if that were true, you should have turned us away. We were children, and you told us things no child should hear.”

  “Kids, they all think about death. Everyone thinks about it! And the ones that make their way to me—they got their reasons, every one of ’em, so I give ’em what they came for. Children are pure in their wishes—they got courage; they want knowledge, they’re not afraid of it. You were a bold little boy, I remember you. But you didn’t like what you heard. So don’t believe me, then—don’t believe me! Live like you don’t believe me.”

  “I do live like that. I do.” He’s veering off track. It’s the fatigue and the cold—how does Bruna stand it?—the drive, the thought of Mira finding his cell phone on the floor. “Do you know your own future? Your own death?”

  Bruna appears to be shuddering until he realizes she’s shaking her head. “No, I don’t know it. I can’t see myself.”

  “You can’t see yourself.” A cruel pleasure blooms in Daniel. “That must drive you insane.”

  She’s his mother’s age, his mother’s size. But Gertie is robust. Somehow, Bruna looks both bloated and frail.

  He aims his gun. “What if it’s now?”

  The woman gasps. She puts her hands over her ears, and the comforter falls to the floor, revealing her nightgown and bare legs. Her feet are crossed at the ankle and pressed together for warmth.

  “Answer me,” says Daniel.

  She speaks thinly, from the upper register of her throat. “If it’s now, it’s now.”

  “It doesn’t have to be now, though,” he says, fingering the gun. “I could do it any time. Show up at your door, you’d never know when I was coming. Which would you rather? Going now, or never knowing when? Waiting, waiting, walking on tiptoes—looking over your shoulder every fucking day, sticking around while everyone around you dies and you wonder whether it should’ve been you, and hating yourself because—”

  “It’s your day!” shouts Bruna, and Daniel is startled by the change in her voice, how it becomes lower and more confident. “Your day, it’s today. That’s why you’re here.”

  “You think I don’t know that? You think I didn’t do this intentionally?” he says, but Bruna is looking at him with a dubiousness that suggests another narrative: one in which he did not come intentionally at all but was compelled by the very same factors as Simon and Klara. One in which his decision was rigged from the start, because the woman has some foresight he can’t understand, or because he is weak enough to believe this.

  No. Simon and Klara were pulled magnetically, unconsciously; Daniel is in full possession of his faculties. Still, the two narratives float like an optical illusion—a vase or two faces?—each as convincing as the other, one perspective sliding out of prominence as soon as he relaxes his hold on it.

  But there is one way he can make his own interpretation become permanent, the other fading into what was before, or might have been. He isn’t sure whether the idea just occurred to him or whether it’s been inside him since he saw her photograph.

  The woman’s eyes flick to the left, and Daniel goes still. At first, he only hears the rush of the waterfall, but then another noise becomes apparent: the slow, padded crunch of feet in the gorge.

  “Don’t move,” he says.

  He walks to the cab. When his eyes adjust to the dark, he sees a black mass moving quickly through the narrow passage.

  “Get out,” says Bruna. “Go.”

  The footsteps are becoming closer now, faster, and his pulse begins to speed.

  “Daniel?” calls a voice.

  The map to West Milton on his computer screen. The business card by the mouse pad. Mira must have found them. She must have called Eddie.

  “Daniel!” Eddie shouts.

  Daniel moans.

  “I told you get out,” Bruna says.

  But Eddie is too close. Daniel sees a figure scrambling up over the edge of the gorge and into the clearing. His stomach rises and turns. He slams Bruna’s folding table up toward the wall so that the boxes fall to the floor. The metal folding chairs collapse on top of them.

  “All right,” snaps Bruna. “That’s enough.”

  But Daniel can’t stop. He is alarmed by his own fear, by the deep unstoppable rush of it. It is not him, it is not his: he must cut it out at the root. He walks to the counter beside the sink and uses the barrel of his gun to knock the religious icons to the floor. He empties the boxes in the front seats, dumping their contents—newspapers and canned food, playing cards and tarot cards, old papers and photographs—on the ground. Bruna is shouting now, rising heavily from the couch, but he moves past her to the bedroom door. He rips the wooden cross from its peg and slams it into the wall of the trailer.

  “You got no right to do that,” Bruna cries, unsteady on her feet. “This is my home.” The whites of her eyes are threaded red, and the bags beneath them gleam. “I been here for years, and I’m not going nowhere. You got no right. I’m an American, same as you.”

  Daniel grabs her wrist. It feels like a chicken bone.

  “You are not,” he says, “the same as me.”

  The door of the Regatta swings open, and Eddie appears in the frame. He’s off duty, wearing a leather jacket and jeans, but his badge is out and his gun drawn.

  “Daniel,” he says. “Drop your weapon.”

  Daniel shakes his head. He has so rarely acted with courage. So now he will—for Simon, his sexuality hidden in life, understood only in death. For Klara, wild-eyed, tied to a light on the ceiling. For Saul, who worked twelve-hour days so that his children might not, and for Gertie, who lost them all.

  It is, for him, an act of faith. Faith not in God, but in his own agency. Faith not in fate, but in choice. He would live. He will live. Faith in life.

  He still holds Bruna’s delicate wrist. He raises the gun to her temple, and she cringes.

  “Daniel,” roars Eddie. “I’ll shoot.”

  But Daniel barely hears him. The freedom, the expansiveness, of thinking he is innocent: it fills and lifts him like helium. He looks down at Bruna Costello. Once he believed that responsibility flowed between them like air. Now he can’t remember what he thought they had in common.

  “Akana mukav tut le Devlesa.” Bruna speaks under her breath, a strained mutter. “Akana mukav tut le Devlesa. I now leave you to God.”

  “Listen to me, Daniel,” Eddie says. “After this, I can’t help you.”

  Daniel’s hands are damp. He cocks the gun.

  “Akana mukav tut le Devlesa,” says Bruna. “I now leave you to—”

  PART FOUR

  Place of Life

  2006–2010

  Varya

  28.

  Frida is hungry.

  Varya enters the vivarium at seven thirty and already the monkey is standing up in her cage, holding on to the bars. Most of the animals warble and chirp, knowing that Varya’s arrival portends breakfast, but Frida releases the same rapid bark she has for weeks. “Shh-shh,” says Varya. “Shh-shh.” Each monkey receives a puzzle feeder that forces them to work for their food as they would in the wild: they use their fingers to guide a pellet from the top of a yellow plastic maze to a hole at the bottom. Frida’s neighbors scrabble at the feeders, but Frida leaves hers on the cage floor. The pu
zzle is easy for her; she could have the pellet in seconds. Instead she stares at Varya and calls in alarm, her mouth wide enough to hold an orange.

  A flash of dark hair, a hand on the doorway, and Annie Kim pokes her head into the room.

  “He’s here,” she says.

  “Early.” Varya wears blue scrubs and two pairs of heavy, elbow-length gloves. Her short hair is protected by a shower cap, her face by a mask and plastic shield. Still, the odor of urine and musk is overpowering. She detects it in her condo as well as the lab. She isn’t sure whether her own body has begun to take on the scent or whether it’s now so familiar that she imagines it everywhere.

  “Only by five minutes. Look,” Annie says. “The sooner you get going, the sooner it’ll be over. Like pulling a tooth.”

  Some of the monkeys have finished their puzzles and call for more food. Varya uses her elbow to scratch an itch on her waist. “A weeklong dentist appointment.”

  “Most grant applications take longer,” says Annie, and Varya laughs. “Remember: when you look at him, see dollar signs.”

  She holds the door open for Varya with her foot. As soon as it closes behind them, the screeching is almost undetectable, as if it comes from a distant TV. The building is concrete, with few windows, and all the rooms are soundproof. Varya follows Annie through the hallway to their shared office.

  “Frida’s still on her hunger strike,” Varya says.

  “She won’t hold out much longer.”

  “I don’t like it. She makes me uneasy.”

  “Don’t you think she knows that?” Annie asks.

  The office is a long rectangle. Varya’s desk is tucked into the short western wall; Annie’s rests against the long southern one, to the left of the door. Between their desks, opposite the door, is a steel laboratory sink. Annie sits and swivels to face her computer. Varya removes her mask and shield, scrubs and gloves, hair and shoe covers. She washes her hands, soaping and rinsing three times in the hottest water she can stand. Then she adjusts her street clothes: a pair of black slacks and a blue oxford shirt with a black cardigan buttoned on top.