by Anna North
“During visiting hours?” she asked.
Armin turned to Darcy, his face both pleading and conspiratorial. Darcy reached down into her lungs and pulled up her most authoritative voice.
“In his condition,” she said, “properly scheduled sleep is very important. It helps with fluid balance.”
The woman looked at her, and she felt the prickly heat of her appraisal. Her eyes, unlike the man’s, were large and still. They were used to sizing people up. Darcy wondered what it would be like if your approval were worth so much you had to be careful where you bestowed it.
The woman nodded.
“Well if you need your rest, you need your rest. Come on, Jacob, we’ll come back next week.”
She allowed the man to walk ahead of her, so he wouldn’t seem to be following. On her way out she looked at Darcy again, this time as though she were memorizing.
“Thanks for backing me up,” Armin said when they were gone. “I just can’t stand my sister for more than twenty minutes.”
Darcy strapped the cuff around his arm.
“Why not?” she asked.
His face took on the same abstracted look it wore when he talked about Marina, but now he sounded lost, frightened, like a child alone on the sidewalk.
“I was eleven years old when she was born. My mother didn’t want to have another baby. Already we were having trouble getting by—my parents had an online store, and it was getting harder to ship things; the power was out all the time. But my dad, he joined the church around that time. One of the new ones, the Revelationists. He wouldn’t let her get an abortion. He said Christ was coming to make a paradise for all of us, where we would all eat manna and the dead would come back to life. He actually said that.”
His voice was high and boyish, freshly outraged.
“And so they had my sister, and things just got worse. Even when she was a little baby, she’d give me this look, like, I’m hungry, but I’m not going to complain about it—every day when we were kids, every time I got an orange or a cake for my birthday or a good coat for going outside. When she followed me here she didn’t lose it. But now it’s changed. Now I’m not a big Board member anymore, I’m just an old man wasting away in a bed. Now her look says, I’m so hungry, but I’m about to eat.”
Darcy looked into his face and saw a coddled child, someone for whom the hardened, the uncoddled, had a mysterious power. She imagined Marina—thin, short, malnourished, a raw pointed look to her chin and cheekbones, a little furtive economy of gesture. A quick awareness of all the exits in the room, like a thief or a mouse.
“I need something,” she said.
At first he looked at her with confusion—was it distrust?—and Marina faded from her mind and she became for a moment her uncertain self. But then all the reason went out of his eyes, even as he tried to make them look shrewd and withholding, and he said, “I’m not sure I can do much for you,” but she knew he meant, What do you need?
“Marcelle keeps a record on all the residents,” Darcy said. “There’s one I need to see.”
Armin’s face turned pinched and annoyed.
“I don’t know anything about any records,” he said. “You’d know more about that than me.”
Whatever he had wanted to do for her, this wasn’t it. Darcy tried to conjure the image of Marina again, but all she saw was Armin’s face in front of her, turning away into the pillows.
She sat down on the bed.
“Listen,” she said. “My mom disappeared last week. She’s the only family I have, she’s all I have, and I have to find her. I think Marcelle’s records might help.”
He was looking at her again, but skeptically, his eyes cool. She imagined him as a boy, his unsunned skin soft and white as bread. She thought of begging him, telling him he was her only hope. Then, instead, she rose as though to leave.
“It’s all right,” she said. “Forget it. I’ll ask someone else.”
She put her hand on the door. She heard him shift beneath his covers.
“Wait,” he said. “Which ones do you need?”
Another sheet of paper peeked out from under Darcy’s door. She scrambled down to snatch it, as though someone might get to it before her. It was a pornoflyer—a cartoon woman was pressing her round breasts together, the nipples peeking out through her fingers. She wore a bikini bottom in a strange pattern—not checks or stripes, but tiny crosshatches and squiggles. A speech bubble said, “I’m waiting for YOU.”
Darcy flipped the sheet over—an ad for a strip club. She flipped it again. The woman’s breasts stared at her. She threw it on the floor and yelled at it for making her think it was a message. She started to feel light-headed. Her ankle was doing something more complex than throbbing. It was speaking to her, bubbling words up through her leg. It was saying random dirty words like a crazy person. Shitfuckevilfucktit, it was saying.
She unwrapped the cloth that Sunshine had tied for her. It looked like it had been a T-shirt—now it was printed with dirt and sweat. She looked off into the murk of the apartment for a minute before she could make herself look at her leg. She counted down from three.
It looked like someone else’s leg. Darcy looked at her left leg and felt a little purr of familiarity, the soft, semiconscious “yes” that the brain gives itself when it sees a place where its own blood flows. She looked at her right leg and saw the limb of some other person, some person who was lying alongside her and seemed to share with her a knee and part of a calf, but whose ankle and foot had turned a color that no one should ever allow skin to turn, a blackish gray not so much bruised as stony, as though the leg were slowly becoming a statue.
Darcy retched but forced herself not to vomit. She took the T-shirt to the bathroom and rinsed the dirt away. She carried it still damp back to the apartment and put it in the mini fridge. When it was cold, she wrapped her ankle up again. The voice didn’t stop, but it grew soft, like children through a window. She imagined her mind as a hand reaching out, closing the window. She lay down on the bed. The flyer lay upside down next to her head—the bikini bottom was level with her eyes. The pattern looked different now. It looked like letters.
She sat up. She held the flyer close to her face. She read the letters on the woman’s crotch. They said, “LIST OF THE MISSING.”
Armin was sleeping. His knees were drawn up near his chest and his hands were pillowed under his head. It was only when he lay crumpled like this that Darcy understood how tall he must’ve been when he could still stand. Stretched out, his attenuated limbs got lost in the blankets. Folded, they took on weight and became visible. His bony calves were as long as a four-year-old child. His hands were big as palm fronds. He was murmuring in his sleep, secret tiny prelinguistic sounds. Darcy knew she shouldn’t wake him. It was policy to come back later if a resident was sleeping, and his murmuring face held a kind of calm intention, so different from the shifting, questing look he showed her when he was awake that it seemed like a small act of violence to shatter it. She hesitated. Then she walked forward and shook his pinioned arm.
He woke like an animal, inarticulate and snarling. His lips pulled back over graying teeth. She had seen that face before on a dog in the alley behind her high school, when a monkey tried to grab its can of cheese food. She almost expected him to snap at her, but then his lips closed, his eyes widened, his human brain awoke and sealed itself around the animal one.
“I was dreaming,” he said.
“What about?”
He gave her a kind of bent-mouthed leer.
“How old are you?” he asked her.
She tried to imagine how Marina would’ve responded, cold but somehow not discouraging. She lifted her chin, turned her face a few degrees away.
“Old enough.”
But his eyes darkened, his mouth fell into a rueful frown.
“You’re not old enough.”
Darcy didn’t know what to say. She felt his pulse. It was slow, but his skin was sweaty.
“Did you g
et the reports?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Can I see them?”
“Would you do something for me first?”
She tried to take stock of what she would be willing to do. She would unbutton her jumpsuit to the waist, but would she take it off? Would she put his penis in her mouth?
“What is it?” she said.
“Marina used to wear her hair in a braid, kind of wound up into a coil at the back of her head.”
“All right.”
“She never took it down while we were together, except when she thought I was sleeping, and it was really cold, and she would undo it, and pull it down around her ears, and wind her fingers up in it to keep them warm.”
Darcy reached back to divide her hair for braiding. He shook his head.
“No,” he said, “if you could—” He looked down at his hands, embarrassed. “It’s not the same if I see you braid it.”
“Can you shut your eyes?”
He scratched his index finger with his thumbnail.
“Can you go outside?” he asked.
She stuck her head out the door—no one was in the hallway.
“Okay,” she said, and she shut the door behind her.
The hallway was thinly coated with human sounds, with the yelp and mutter and breath and rustle of men and women in their beds. Darcy tried to twist the noises on their way from her ear to her brain, to hear lovemaking instead of coughing, night terrors instead of the ravings of old age. She imagined a hotel from the time before, how the chill would seep in through wooden walls, how her feet would sink into the bearskin rugs. The hotel in her mind was a place both luxuriant and frigid, where bony hips knocked together on feather beds, and women’s heavy jewels bruised their famished skins, and hungry mouths chewed orange rinds and dried flower petals. How would someone act in a place like that if she had never known any luxury, if she had gone to bed hungry three nights out of every week for as long as she could remember, and worn old bedspreads to school throughout the ever-lengthening winters, and opened her legs at thirteen and a half to a boy with ragged fingernails and a sore on his upper lip? Wouldn’t she smile a little, as she did up her hair in the morning, to see these people brought low as her mother always said they would be? And wouldn’t she braid her hair tightly, and coil it up neat, so that even in these threadbare times, no one could see the squalor that she came from?
As she found a way to tuck the end of the braid so the coil stayed tight, she imagined the man waiting in the room for her. She imagined him young, anxious, clutching the pallid hothouse flowers that had cost him two weeks’ salary. He would try to compose the face he liked to show to her, the face of someone familiar with affairs in hotel rooms, someone who might even meet another woman in another hotel later that day. He would say to himself, “I don’t care if she comes today,” and he would try to make himself believe it, and not think of her lying curled in the snow somewhere, or putting her mouth on the mouth of someone with more money and better connections than him. He would pretend to read, or turn on the television and watch part of a western. Then he would hear the door handle, and he would forget how to make the face he’d practiced, so that when she entered—cheeks still flushed from the cold, hair done up neatly—she would see how life had shrunk for him, dwindled down until it was the shape of the air around her body as she moved toward him.
She opened the door. She could see his young face on his old face. She could feel the other woman’s skin lying over her skin. She reached up to take her braids out. Her hair fell across her shoulders; she had never been so conscious of it before, the way it felt, the way it must look. She felt beautiful. She saw that Armin was crying.
“What’s wrong?” she asked him.
“She’s dead,” he sobbed. “I left—I left her and she’s dead.”
“She’s not dead,” Darcy said, breaking character. “She’s probably on the island somewhere. I bet she has a really nice apartment in Sonoma.”
He pressed his long bony hands to his face.
“No,” he said. “I left her there and she died. They all died. We abandoned them.”
“It’s not your fault,” Darcy whispered.
“There’s always one more person we could’ve taken,” he said to her. “If not Marina, then someone else. We didn’t do all we could.”
She knew it was true, but then again, for every extra person they brought over, there would be one less patch of earth here on the island, one less jellyfish bar or can of cheese food in the convenience store every day, one less job. She had things she needed now, and Armin’s guilt seemed far away, frozen, and antique.
“It’s not your fault,” she said again, and then, “By any chance, did you get a look at Yuka’s files?”
He was still crying. He put his face in the pillow and made a noise like a hurt cat.
“I’ve failed everyone,” he said.
Anger rose up in her.
“You didn’t see them?”
He shook his head.
“Marcelle wouldn’t let me,” he said. “She says they’re confidential. I’m sorry, I just—I wanted something of Marina so badly. I wanted to see her again.”
Yuka’s hands lay on her bedspread, tense and compact as cats’ paws. When she saw Darcy the good half of her face went taut and sly. Her bad eye stared out past the walls of the room.
“So, did you bring me something?”
Her voice was teasing, like a girl’s. Darcy imagined her as a teenager, the two halves of her face matched up in a haughty smirk.
“I couldn’t,” Darcy said. “Marcelle says they’re confidential. I’m sorry.”
Yuka reached for a glass of juice on her bedside table and took a sip from the straw. Her expression was obscure now, impossible to read.
“That’s no good for either of us, is it?” she said.
Darcy put her blood-pressure cuff and notepad down on the table.
“Look,” she said. “Why don’t you just tell me what you know? What’s the point of holding out?”
Yuka took another sip of her drink. A little clear liquid dribbled out the slack side of her mouth and she wiped it away with her good hand.
“I have something you want,” Yuka said. “Why should I give it away for free?”
Darcy sucked her anger and confusion down into a ball in her gut.
“Why do you want to see your chart anyway? What’s so interesting about it?”
Yuka was silent for a moment. She seemed to be studying Darcy’s face. When she spoke her voice was quieter than usual.
“I had friends, people on the Board. People I worked with, people I trusted. I want to know why none of them ever visit me.”
“Maybe they’re busy,” Darcy said.
“Maybe. But I think Marcelle might be keeping them away from me.”
Darcy understood Yuka’s face now. It was bereft.
“Why would she do that?” Darcy asked.
“I don’t know,” Yuka said. “I can’t tell.”
Darcy felt sorry for her then, and for Armin. She knew what it was like to be alone, to feel your world shrink down to the diameter of your skull. She knew what it was to crave someone powerlessly, to wake up every morning and have to remind yourself that this was life and not a nightmare. And at the same time, she saw an opening.
“I could be your friend,” she said to Yuka. “It’s not like I have any of my own.”
Yuka looked at her for a moment. Then she shook her head.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she said.
“I might,” Darcy said. “Try me.”
“You know how long I’ve been living here?”
Darcy shook her head.
“Five years. When I came to World Experiences, I was eighty-one. I’d had parrot fever twice already, plus a stroke, and I couldn’t speak or eat or shit on my own. I had to relearn everything, like a baby. And still I can’t walk, and the medication they have me on makes me see things. Sometimes I see the face of a
dead woman hovering over the end of my bed.”
“That’s terrible,” Darcy said.
“I’m not stupid. I know not everybody has a nice hospital bed and rehab treatments and medicine. But not everybody did what I did, either.”
She was speaking loudly now, and Darcy could hear a younger voice wrapped in the old vocal cords, straining and failing to reassert itself.
“What did you do?” Darcy asked.
“I was here from the beginning. I was one of the first people to set foot on the eastern beach. And even before that—you could say I’m the reason we’re here in the first place.”
Darcy looked at Yuka’s eyes, saw pride in the good one, need in the bad.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Well, it’s all ancient history now. Everyone else has forgotten about it anyway. Maybe it’s time for me to forget too.”
But Darcy could see that Yuka wanted to tell her—she just wanted to be cajoled a little. She sat down on the bed next to Yuka’s tiny hip.
“I’m interested,” she said.
“Don’t you have other patients to visit?”
Darcy bet that Yuka would want to feel superior. She made a dismissive wave of her hand.
“They won’t notice if I’m late,” she said.
Yuka took a little preparatory breath, like she was diving into water. Then she began to speak, and she spoke quickly and without pausing, as though she were worried about being stopped.
“When I first got into the Pacifica thing I was married. Daniel. He was an idealist. We both were. We were twenty-five and we’d been living in Arete for two years, ever since our college got shut down. At first it was fun, living in that great big house out in the pines. Lots of the neighbors left, trying to get to the compounds by the Gulf or maybe to South America, and we made fun of how soft they were. Every time we saw a car leave we’d go take what we wanted from their houses. They never locked them—they weren’t coming back. We got a nice big couch for the living room that way, a whole cabinetful of spices, a dog. Once I found a big box of family photos—an outdoor wedding, kids in bathing suits at the beach. All the way back to this young woman sitting in one of those old cars—a Model T—grinning. Of course, we didn’t know how valuable photos would be later—we used them as playing cards until they fell apart.