by Mary Kubica
As a result, his brain’s tasks were all out of whack. His muscles twitched. His heart raced. His blood pressure soared. Coordination was lost. He could no longer function properly. It went on like this until he died.
The most gruesome part? Though the body goes to pot, the mind does not. Thought processes remain relatively intact. They’re clued in completely to their own demise.
The ill sweat profusely.
They stop eating, speaking.
They shrivel to nothing but a glassy-eyed stare, eyes shrunken to mere pinpricks, like mine. And then they die. Because, after those long, agonizing nights lying in bed, failing to truly sleep, fatal familial insomnia is nothing but a death sentence for them. The grim reaper coming to steal their life.
I’m waiting for my time.
I sit up in bed. I don’t delude myself into lying down because I know I won’t sleep. And so I sit, engulfed in blackness, legs pulled up to my chest. The blanket is kicked to the end of the bed because, though it’s cold in the carriage home, I’ve begun to sweat. The sweat, it gathers under my arms and in my hairline. My palms are damp with it. The soles of my feet. The skin between my fingers and toes.
My heart beats rapidly.
My head spins.
I stare into blackness, seeing things that I hope are not there. I go through the motions. The typical night, thinking the morbid thoughts, followed by the grieving ones where I miss Mom so much it hurts. It’s a pain in my sternum this time, like heartburn or indigestion. Except that it’s grief.
And then when I’m done grieving, the self-loathing comes, where I despise myself for all of that which I would’ve, could’ve, should’ve done differently. Said I love you while she could still hear me. Hugged her longer and with more frequency. Run a hand over the dark chocolate fuzz that had started to regrow on her scalp after her last round of chemo was through.
I bullet point them all in my mind. All the things I should’ve done.
The silence and the blackness of the room become suddenly suffocating and I feel like I can’t breathe. I’m drowning in silence. Being asphyxiated by it.
I turn to my knees and peel the shade back, gazing outside. The world tonight is dark, a carbon gray. Not quite black, but close enough. Little by little, my eyes adapt to it, and though it’s dark outside, I can see. Not perfectly, but I can see something. A halo of light from a streetlamp, a half a block away. Orion the hunter, brightening the sky. His shield is aimed at me as he hovers, light-years above the greystone, club hoisted above his head with a dog at his feet. For whatever reason, the light makes me feel less alone and less scared.
And then, as the moonlight slips out from behind a cloud, it settles on the greystone. As my eyes adjust to it, the house begins to slowly take shape. My eyes rise up from ground level, grazing over the kitchen’s sliding glass door, an enclosed porch, up the home’s rear facade, and there they make out an amorphous shape standing in the open window of the third floor. The very same window, which, for the last two nights, radiated light.
Except that tonight it’s dark. There is no light, but rather a pair of eyes.
The bile in my stomach begins to rise. I feel like I could be sick. I press a hand to my mouth to silence my own scream.
The moonlight reflects off the eyes, making them glint in the darkness of night. They’re undeniable. They’re there. I’m not just making them up.
But beyond the eyes I see little else. Just a formless, shadowy shape to let me know that someone is standing in the window, watching me.
I let the shade go and it falls closed.
I grab Mom and her urn from a bedside table and slip to the floor, thinking that I don’t want to be here in this carriage home, that I want to leave. That I’d rather be anywhere else in the world but here. But also realizing that I have nowhere to go. I press Mom to me and hold her tight because with her in my arms, I feel less alone. I scoot to a wall and press my back to it, heart beating hard. I try to defuse my fears, to make myself feel better, by telling myself that it’s only Ms. Geissler. That it’s only Ms. Geissler watching me.
And yet it doesn’t make me feel better. Because Ms. Geissler is a stranger to me. We’ve hardly met. I don’t know a single thing about her, other than she lied about the squirrels inside her home, but for what reason, I don’t know.
My heart pounds. My hands are moist. They sweat and again I’m sure that I am dying. That the perspiration is a symptom of fatal familial insomnia, which has stolen my sleep from me and is now coming to take my life.
I want to get out of here. I want to leave. And yet I paid nearly everything I have to be here. I can’t get out of here, I can’t leave. I have nowhere to go.
I pull my knees into my chest. I drop my head to them and close my eyes. I pray to sleep, over and over I say it. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. Please just let me sleep. I beg for morning to come, for the sun to rise higher and higher in the sky, chasing the nighttime away.
For eight days now it’s gone like this. Eight nights.
How many more days and nights can I go on without sleep?
And then I hear something. Just a murmur, faint at first like the sound of a piano playing from some other room. A gentle melody. But, of course, that can’t be because there’s no piano in the next room, and no one here to play it but me. And I’m not playing a piano.
My ears stand at attention. My head tips. I listen, and though I want to stay, firmly anchored to the wall where I can see through the darkness to know what’s coming for me, I lift my body from the floor, carrying Mom’s ashes with me. It’s unintentional when I press a single palm down on the ground to hoist myself up. The other clutches tightly to Mom, pressing her to my chest like a newborn baby. I stand to an almost-upright position, bent at the shoulders so I don’t hit my head on the low ceiling. And still I do hit my head, crashing into a low-lying wooden beam, so hard that when I press my fingers to it I feel the undeniably sticky texture of blood.
I tiptoe down the steps, one tread at a time, so slowly that it’s almost as if I’m not moving at all. As I descend, voices surface. Not just one, but two or three or four. One lead and a host of background singers to accompany the piano. It makes me gasp for breath. My legs become weak, incapacitated; they start to give as I clutch the stair railing for support, squeezing so tightly the muscles of my hands cramp.
I can’t go on. I don’t want to go on. But I do because I have to. Because there’s nothing there, because there’s some reasonable explanation for the sound. A car stereo playing outside the carriage home, maybe, the tune getting carried in through an open window.
But I won’t know what it is unless I go see.
I force myself to creep down the steps. I edge across the floorboards, willing myself forward, creeping, one step at a time. Following the sound, which comes from a wall and not the window at all because the window is closed tight.
The song isn’t coming from the stereo of a car parked somewhere outside.
It’s coming from inside the carriage home.
I go after the sound, and it leads me to an old vintage pie safe pressed flush against a wall, a petite bookshelf with a couple of shelves and a door. It’s one of the few pieces of furniture that came with the carriage home.
I grab a hold of the knob and pull the door open swiftly, dropping to my knees. As I gaze inside, I find that it’s empty, which makes no sense because the song is in there. It’s coming from the pie safe. I feel blindly with my hands, moving them up and down the edges of the shelves, feeling for something, though what I don’t know.
And then a thought comes to me.
What if the sound isn’t coming from the pie safe? What if it’s coming from somewhere behind?
I don’t think twice. I shove the pie safe out of the way. It isn’t heavy, but it isn’t light either. I press a shoulder into it. It takes some jostling as
it skids across the floor.
And there, on the wall behind where the pie safe was placed, I discover a cast-iron air return grille. One of those wall-mounted vents that leads into the duct system. It’s an air return, one that sucks stale air from the room and cycles it back through the home’s ductwork, leading, I have to assume, to the floor register upstairs where I heard the undeniable ping the other night. Ping, and then nothing. Ping, and then nothing.
Except that nothing is getting sucked up in here. Instead it’s getting forced out.
And it’s not air at all, but music. Gladys Knight & the Pips, “Midnight Train to Georgia.”
How can this be?
I press my whole body against the grille to listen to the song. Mom’s favorite. One she used to play over and over again until I got sick of it. Until I pouted and told her to turn it off because it was old people music. Those were the words I used. Old people music.
I’m stricken with the most impossible of thoughts, one that makes the hairs on my arms stand on end.
Mom is there. Inside the home’s ductwork.
I set the urn down on the floor and, at first, try to jerk the whole thing off the wall with both of my hands. It won’t budge. I grip the edges of the grille and pull, but I don’t have a good grip on it and it slips easily from my grasp. I tumble backward, falling to the floor. The air return grille is wedged on too tight, held to the wall with four screws, one in each corner. I make an attempt to unscrew each with a bare hand, pinching and twisting the jagged screws until the skin splits, catching a sharp edge of it, one that’s been whet over time. My finger starts to drip with blood.
But the screws don’t move. Not even a little bit.
I grit my teeth and pinch and twist harder, but still nothing. They don’t budge the slightest bit.
And so I wedge a fingernail into the slotted screw and turn. But all that happens is my nail breaks, getting ripped in two, leaving my nails in tatters. I curse out loud from the pain of it before hoisting myself from the floor and hurrying to the kitchen for a knife. I shuffle through a cutlery drawer—tossing forks and spoons out of the way, spilling them one by one to the floor—and find a butter knife.
I run back to the air return. I fall again to my knees.
I stick the knife into the screw head, turning counterclockwise as hard as I can. Bearing down on that knife with my whole body weight.
This time, it turns.
I spin and I spin that knife, desperate, gasping, as if I might just find Mom inside the air return. Because for this moment that’s exactly what I’m thinking. That that’s where she is. Inside the air return. I don’t know how or why, but she is. She’s there. I’m just sure of it.
I pluck one screw from the wall and move on to the next one. And the next one. And the next. All four screws tumble to the ground.
The grille loses its grip on the wall and falls. The sound is clamorous. I shove it out of the way and look inside. It’s some sort of stainless steel box set there behind the air return grille, one that changes course about a foot of the way in. I can’t see far enough inside to see where it goes and so I reach in a hand, grasping, sweating, but come up empty, thinking that behind that curve there are miles and miles of pipes and tubes which somehow or other lead to Mom. Mom is at the end of those tubes, listening to her music, speaking to me.
I try going in headfirst and then feetfirst. But I don’t fit and in time give up, because I don’t know what else to do.
I spend the rest of the night lying on the floor beside the air return in the fetal position, listening to Gladys Knight sing to me.
eden
September 26, 2010
Chicago
We bought our first computer today, at Jessie’s insistence. I’d been saving for some time for it, hoping to surprise her because, as Jessie says, we’re the last two people in the world without a computer, which may or may not be true.
We had to take a cab to the store for it, so that we could tote the boxes home in the trunk of the cab, while the driver waited impatiently for us to load and unload, meter running the whole time, never once offering to help. And then, at home, after Jessie and I lugged the boxes to the office, we sat on the floor, methodically reading instructions and trying our best to decipher which cords went where. The directions might as well have been written in Japanese, the illustrations done up for a four-year-old.
When all was said and done, I was shocked to find that, when we turned it on, the thing came to life, some sort of revolving image—a screen saver, Jessie told me—moving about on the screen.
Jessie went straight for the internet. “Look yourself up,” she encouraged me, and I asked what she meant by that, thinking she’d just use this computer to type up papers for school. I hadn’t thought much of her fiddling around on the internet, but I saw quickly that it was the one thing on her mind, the reason she wanted this computer. To look stuff up on the internet.
“Go ahead,” she said again with an enthusiastic nod of the head, dishwater hair falling into her eyes. “Type in your name,” she told me, “and see what you find.”
But I laughed only, telling her we wouldn’t find anything, because certainly I’m not on the internet. That’s the kind of thing reserved for celebrities and politicians. Not everyday, ordinary people like me. But Jessie was certain.
“The internet knows everything,” she told me, emphasizing that word everything, and I filled instantly with dread, trying to assure myself that it was only the ramblings of an eager preteen, that certainly the internet couldn’t know everything, like some sort of omniscient god.
But Jessie’s hands breezed past mine, and with nimble fingers, she typed Eden Sloane onto the keyboard and pressed the return key.
It didn’t happen right away.
No, there was a moment of naive disbelief while the computer did its thing. In that moment, I assured myself that we’d find nothing. Nothing at all. Of course the internet didn’t know anything about me because why would it? What reason did I have to be on the internet?
But then an image popped onto the screen before us. And there was my name, highlighted any number of times. My stomach dropped at the sight of them, all these results the computer had gathered for Eden Sloane. Some of them, I saw—as my eyes sailed past the results one at a time, trying to decipher which secrets of mine Jessie would soon find—were not me. There was a split second of relief.
It’s another Eden Sloane. It’s not me.
But then one listing caught my eye, rattling me to the core. Because there, on the internet, for anyone to see, was my name and, beside it, the address of Jessie’s and my home, our little bungalow on the northwest side of Chicago, where I thought no one could find us, where I stupidly believed there was no way to know where we were.
I was wrong.
Because now I see that any and everyone is privy to that information, that anyone who’s looking for me can find out just exactly where I am.
It was unconscious then, the way that I rose to my feet quickly and moved to the window, pulling the curtains closed post-haste. When Jessie gave me a look, I blamed the glare of sunlight on the computer screen—a glare that wasn’t ever there—and she believed me.
I haven’t disappeared after all.
All this time, I’ve been out in the open, living right under everyone’s noses.
My throat constricted and went dry. I choked on my own saliva. I coughed, a desperate, panicked cough, unable for a moment to breathe past the saliva that was lodged in my throat.
“You okay?” Jessie asked, patting my back, and I nodded my head yes, though even I didn’t know if that was true or not. Was I okay?
When I could speak, I asked her to run down the hall and fetch me a glass of water.
As she did, I snatched the electrical cord from the socket, watching as the screen turned blissfully black. I started packing
the computer back in its box the moment Jessie left and, that very same afternoon, planned to hail another cab and return it to the store.
When Jessie returned with the glass of water and asked what I was doing—as I sat there on my haunches, wrapping foam paper around the computer parts—I told her that the computer was broken. That there was something wrong with it, which of course there was. There was something very wrong with it.
I told her that it would have to go back. I avoided Jessie’s eyes as, there in the doorway, her face quickly fell. “Can we get a new one?” she asked, and though I said yes, I didn’t for one second mean it.
Because there would be something wrong with that computer too.
As Jessie and I stood on the drive, waiting for a cab to appear, I couldn’t help but wonder, What other secrets of mine did the internet hold?
jessie
The music gets chased away with morning’s first light, and now the house is silent and still. It startles me, the way the music suddenly stops, and now that it’s gone, I have to wonder if it was ever really there. I sit up with a start, sticking to the wooden floor. I’ve been sweating. I say my own name aloud to be sure I can still speak, that fatal familial insomnia hasn’t stolen my voice from me already. “Jessica Sloane,” I say, my words slurred.
I find myself on my hands and knees searching for Mom’s urn, knowing I left her here beside me last night. I comb through the planks of the hardwood floors, as if somehow or other she’s slipped through the millimeter gap between boards.
It’s a sinking feeling. A spreading, sinking feeling that comes to me at once.
I’ve lost Mom.
I don’t know who I am anymore. I can’t go on, I won’t go on without her here. I hold my breath and refuse to breathe. And just when I think I’m about to die, I see her. Just two feet away, on the other side of me, right where I left her. My panic comes to a halt.
Mom is still here. She’s not yet gone. I release my breath and, at the same time, somehow hear the labored sound of Mom breathing through the air return. Short, shallow breaths followed by no breaths at all.