by Anna North
The slot shut and the box filled up. It filled up not with words but with pressure, pressure on all sides of the box, pressure on every point on the inside of Darcy’s skull. She held her head together with her hands.
“Would you like me to leave now?” the guard asked.
Darcy nodded without looking up.
When he shut the door and she was alone in the room, Darcy began to feel human again. She felt a surging panic not just in her brain but in her bones and her muscles and her gut, and she wanted to run to a place where the panic was not. She ran in a circle on the floor in front of the bed, ignoring the pain in her foot, and then she took off all her clothes and ran in a circle in the opposite direction, and then she scratched up and down her thighs until she raised dark purple welts all over them. While she was doing all that she kept thinking that her mother would come in the door. In the preceding month she had moved in the world where her mother was less a person than an idea, like the mainland, like the moon. Now every second was the second when her mother reached her hand out toward the door from the outside, the second before she turned the knob. She would hear the turn of the knob and she herself would turn and then she would fall to the floor and she would lie naked on the floor like a baby, and her mother would lift her up by the armpits, but first she would kiss her eyebrows and smooth her hair back and sing her a song. The time in which all this was about to happen was without duration, it was a vast white sheet of time, time like a snowfield, and when the door did open and Darcy felt relief burst painfully all through her body, and when it was Marie touching her forehead and speaking in a quiet voice, the snowfield did not end but went on outside and above normal time, and Darcy felt herself returning to and leaving it all the time she and Marie were speaking.
“Do you want something to eat?”
“No.”
“Do you want something to help you sleep?”
Now the pills in Marie’s hand were blue.
“No.”
“Is there anything I can do for you?”
A calm spot was floating across normal time.
“I want to see her body.”
They walked through the courtyard, past a trellis on which a flowering vine was growing, and then down a covered walkway to a large building, and through the silent halls of the building into a room lit with bright, cold bulbs. The walls in the room were full of drawers, and Marie looked at a chart on a table and then pulled out one of the drawers, and Darcy saw her mother’s face inside it and then she cried without thinking about anything.
Marie tried to touch her shoulders but she moved away. Her mother’s face looked so familiar that it shocked her. It didn’t look like her sleeping face—it looked like her face in the morning when she had finished sleeping, when she was leaving her eyes shut and letting the not-yet-hot morning air pass across her eyelids and her shut lips and the smooth loose landscape of her skin. Darcy had often wanted to take her mother’s face in both hands at that time of the morning, and to encircle it like a cherished object, a small gem or bead. She had never done it, for fear of disturbing her, but she did it now, and the skin was cold and waxy but her mother’s face looked as she always thought it would look, like something contained and boundaried, something that could be treasured and kept safe. Darcy sobbed into the silent room. The engines of the world had failed.
“Do you want me to cut you some of her hair?” Marie asked.
“No,” Darcy said.
Then Marie asked again and Darcy realized she hadn’t said it out loud.
“No.”
“Do you want to go back to your room?”
“It isn’t my room.”
“It is now.”
Darcy allowed herself to be led. She remembered the way back but she let Marie hold her up and guide her down the walkway and back into the room. She sat on the bed and let Marie pull the covers up over her lap, and when Marie left she looked at the wall. Then Marie came back holding a dish of shell noodles with butter on them, and the bland creamy taste made her think of the early evenings when she still had a bedtime, when she held the dishrag while her mother washed the pan. When her mother whispered to her in their private language before she went to sleep. Marie touched Darcy’s fingers with her fingers as she took the empty dish away, and that tiny tenderness was enough to make Darcy sob again. Marie sat down on the bed and Darcy clutched at her with her eyes shut, and Marie put her hand on Darcy’s back, and the touch was not what Darcy wanted but it was not comfortless, and after a while Darcy let her go and turned away and slept.
10
Darcy did not keep track of the days she spent in bed, ignoring the light from the window, sleeping and waking and taking the two blue pills Marie always left by her bedside and sliding into sleep again. The sleep the pills brought was heavy and solid, and it lay across her for eight or ten black and seamless hours. Only at the end did a few pallid dreams squeak through, dreams of lost objects and broken teeth. Her mother moved through the periphery of these dreams—Darcy found one of her socks, just cast off, the smell of her foot still on it, or saw her hair as she walked out the door. Once she was so sure her mother was calling to her from another room that she hopped to the door and banged on it until Marie came. Her face was cool and sympathetic. That day Darcy began hiding her pills.
She kept them in the bottom drawer of the dresser, in the pocket of a warm-looking gray sweater. She held it up to herself first—it was small, but cut for a man, as were the dark green waterproof jacket and the two white thermal shirts that lay beside it. When she started saving up the pills, she had enough energy to wonder why Tyson would keep those clothes around. Only rich idiots wore sweaters like those, sometimes with the armpits cut out, and sometimes with knit hats that made them pass out in the heat. But these weren’t stylish clothes—they probably came from the mainland, Tyson had probably worn them while he watched the winter closing in and hatched his plan for not being a misfit anymore. Darcy liked to think of the mainland now; she liked to imagine walking across the snow forever, the sun always just about to rise behind her back. This was what she hoped death would be like.
She didn’t know how many pills she’d need, but she didn’t want to underestimate—too few and she might make herself half-dead forever, fry her stomach or cut her legs off from her brain. So she watched her stock grow from two to four to six to eight, all the while scrambling for her bed whenever she heard Marie’s footsteps, feigning a drugged stupor when she came into the room. Her new plan lifted the feeling of pointlessness from her days. She fantasized about death the way girls in school had fantasized about boys. Epifanio Beltran from across the hall had died when she was five or six, and later Augusta had told her that just before his eyes went still they danced all around the room, like it was full of people and he couldn’t get enough of looking at all of them. Later she had asked her mother about death, and her mother had said that when you die, you see not your life flashing before your eyes like people say, but all the possible lives you could’ve lived, like a tree growing outward from the root of you, with an infinite number of branches. And then she had asked her whether her father was such a tree now, and Sarah had said no, because death, like life, had many stages, and we only know the first one, from people coming back after bus accidents, or heart attacks, or being pulled from freezing water. Darcy didn’t believe any of that anymore, but it excited her, like rumors of a famous person she was just about to meet.
When she had twenty pills, Darcy decided it was enough. She waited until just after Marie came in with her lunch—a turkey sandwich with a round of fresh tomato peeking out between the bread—and then she washed all twenty pills down with a glass of orange juice. She had to do it in two shifts, because she gagged on all twenty and had to spit them, blue-bleeding, into her palm. But once she got them all down, a feeling of limpid calm flowed all around her, like warm water, like hands cradling her body. She lay back in the bed and felt herself being gently carried toward death. First she lost the s
ense of her body, of all the fingers and toes to manage and keep track of, all the troublesome breaths to take. Then she felt her brain begin to slacken, to go smooth, until the process of living was not a movement from thought to thought but instead a pleasant, static stillness, like a thread lying on the ground. Then she felt her memories begin to melt, so that even the ground fell away, and she was just a thread in space, a thread with no mother and no father and no future, no pain and no joy and no need and no anger.
Then she began to itch. The feeling started where her feet would have been if she still had feet, but since she had moved past all consciousness of her body it was just a burning, niggling field all around the end of the bed, and spreading up, up, up until Darcy was nothing but a bed-length white-hot rod of unbearably itchy air. A human being can scratch, but Darcy was no longer human, and she couldn’t mold any part of the air into fingers to scratch any other part. She sizzled. She boiled. A thinking part of her came awake and wondered if this was dying. She wondered if it would last forever, if she had gone to hell and been condemned to spend eternity as an itch. She had no sense of her muscles or limbs, but she managed to gain a kind of purchase on the itch itself, to move it in poorly controlled spasms. She could make the itch writhe, and she could make it buck. When it bucked hard enough, it moved a little toward the edge of the bed. With great effort, she managed to buck three more times, and then the itch was falling, the itch was lower than it had been before, and it was turning inside out, and bucking from the inside, and bucking, and bucking, and then someone’s hands were on Darcy’s head, and she understood that she had a head, and that she was kneeling on the floor in a pool of blue-green vomit.
“Drink this,” said a voice.
The itch was still very strong. It was attached to her skin now, and she was scratching, scratching, scratching, but each scratch seemed to open up a new fissure in her skin for the itch to seep down into.
“Don’t scratch,” said the voice, “just drink.”
Darcy’s hand took the glass, and something chalky was in her throat, and then, slowly, the itch began to subside, until it was weak enough that she could breathe and look around and understand that the person with her was Marie.
“They’re not lethal,” she said. “I wouldn’t have given them to you if they were. You’re just going to feel uncomfortable for a while.”
Darcy rolled herself into a ball. Her skin felt like it had been sanded. It was a great effort to find her lips and make them move.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what? Why didn’t I let you kill yourself ?”
Nodding felt like lifting a building.
Marie sighed. “I thought about killing myself once,” she said. “But I didn’t, and I’m glad. I thought you deserved the same chance.”
The words came heavy out of Darcy’s throat. “Why didn’t you?” she asked. Then she shut her eyes and let her head rest against her knees.
“Unlike you,” Marie said, “I never loved my parents. My dad wasn’t around and my mom’s response to the cold was to drink until she felt warm. I had a brother, six years younger than me. A few days after he was born, he was crying, and Mom was off somewhere, so I stuck my finger in his crib and he closed his whole hand around it, just sealed it in there. And he stopped crying. Up until then nobody had paid attention to me, I hardly ever even heard my name. So I decided, this is what this finger is for, this is what I’m for.”
She paused, and put her hand on Darcy’s shoulder as if to make sure she was awake.
“I’m listening,” Darcy said.
But she didn’t lift her head. She liked to imagine she was somewhere else—back in her apartment even, listening to a made-up story. She heard Marie take a breath and then go on.
“After that all the things I had to do—I had to kill our cat so we could eat, and starting when I was twelve I had to give our landlord a hand job every month to keep our heat on—everything was okay to me because I was responsible for my brother, I had to keep him safe. And because of me he didn’t know how bad things were. He thought we had plenty of money; he didn’t know that the reason people were leaving was because otherwise we were going to die. That was enough for me—because he could sleep at night, I could sleep.
“When I was fifteen I started nurses’ training, and I was away from the house every afternoon. My brother didn’t have school anymore—they’d canceled everything except nursing and med school and some of the indoor agriculture programs—so I showed him how to manage on his own. Every morning I got out a ramen packet and a vitamin pill, and I showed him what to burn if the heat went out, and I gave him a wristwatch and a rule about playing outside. Five minutes, I said, then he had to go in. I didn’t want to make him stay inside all the time—I wanted him to get to be a kid, at least a little. And for a long time it worked. He’d eat his ramen, take a vitamin pill, go outside for five minutes, and then later I’d come home and he’d tell me a silly story about the animals he’d seen, even though we both knew there were no animals left.
“Then I met a boy. He was a nursing student too. He was two years younger than me, and he was missing a couple of teeth, but I was so happy to make out with someone for no reason, not because I needed something from him, that I started staying late at work to be with him. We used to kiss in the corner of the hospital waiting room because it was heated and they wouldn’t kick us out. Once I let him put his hand under my shirt and touch my breasts while a kid with frostbite was sobbing right next to us. That’s how we all were then—we’d lost all sense of the proper separation of things. That night I got home late; it was already dark. I looked for my brother in the kitchen, and he wasn’t there. Then I looked in the bedroom, and he wasn’t there. Then I checked Mom’s bedroom and the bathroom and by that time I had started to panic, I was running and crying and screaming his name.
“When I got to the backyard I saw him right away. He was lying in the snow with his hands on his chest, like he was playing dead. And maybe he had been. I don’t know if he forgot about the time, or if he just lay down in the snow and it felt good to be there, or if I’d made him feel so safe in the world that he didn’t take the five-minute rule seriously, but when I touched him he was already so cold he burned my hand.
“After that I wanted to die too. It would’ve been easy—I could’ve just lain down beside him. People turned up in snowbanks all the time then, and you never knew if they’d been caught by a blizzard or just decided to give up. The night he died my mom didn’t come home, and I just stayed up, thinking about whether I should do it. But in the morning I decided I wouldn’t. I decided that trying to protect my brother had made me strong, and that I would get even stronger, and that I should use that strength instead of throwing it away. And I have.”
“Use it for what?” Darcy asked.
“For good, believe it or not,” Marie said. “I know you think the island’s a mess, and it is, but how many civil wars have we had? How many riots? We took twenty thousand starving, desperate people, uprooted them and planted them in a place that was the opposite of everything they knew, and we gave them lots of the comforts of home. Some people said we couldn’t have strawberries, or beef, or even electricity anymore—we proved them wrong. We could’ve done a lot worse.”
Darcy thought about the chaos Marie described, about the story Yuka had told her about the food riot at the co-op. She wondered if Marie was right. She looked up at her and saw the steeliness gone from her face. She saw right down to the bottom of her, and she saw need and sorrow and helplessness calcified over time so that an entire life—a life of power and influence—could be built on top of them. But they were quick at their core—warm and soft like marrow—and something in Darcy quickened too, in sympathy. She took Marie’s hands and placed them around her head. Marie seemed to understand—she held them there. And Darcy felt, in spite of everything, a tenuous kind of peace.
The next day Darcy woke up early. The pills and Marie’s chalky antidote had left a bitte
r taste in her mouth and a heavy, full-body soreness. But her memory was clear. She remembered clinging to Marie, believing in her. Maybe they could work together, maybe Darcy could help dismantle the Seaguards, use their wages to shore up the food banks so that no one would have to go hungry at the end of the month. It sounded tempting, the idea of living here, with plenty of good food and open space and comfort.
She imagined having her own room, calling this room hers. She got up from the bed, tapped the rocking chair to make it go back and forth on its wooden rocker. She wasn’t going to convince herself that she had grown up here, but already she was beginning to get used to real meat, to a soft bed without a valley in the center. Clear, unfetid air smelled normal to her now. In not so long this would feel like her home, and maybe Marie would feel like her family. She didn’t know Marie, and she wasn’t sure she liked her, but she saw how their lives might line up, and how that might come to feel like kinship.
Of course, it would mean breaking with Ansel and Sunshine. But Darcy had no way of knowing if Ansel’s reforms would work—maybe people were too venal to elect their own leaders honestly. In any case, he hadn’t shown up, and that in itself meant his plans weren’t as good as he thought they were. She had been here at least two weeks, and in the haze of her sorrow she had almost forgotten him. Now it looked like he had forgotten her too.
But accepting Marie’s offer would mean accepting if not Tyson himself, then at least his way of governing the island. Would that be like saying that her mother had died for a cause that was essentially wrongheaded? Darcy was angry at her mother, angry at her for not telling her about Daniel, for not telling her everything she had ever known. How was Darcy supposed to know now if Daniel had been right? She tried to imagine her life taking place on the mainland, adapted somehow to the snow. Would she wear a bearskin? Would she eat icicles? Would she have to build up a layer of fat all over her body to hold in the heat? She couldn’t picture it—couldn’t picture anything but the island, its neighborhoods replicas of the older neighborhoods, its shows reenactments of older lives, its food a mockery of older food. What would it be like to make something that was actually new?