The Greed

  Then a Mercedes sedan pulls up and a valet approaches. I push him aside just as the driver’s door opens and level the pistol at the driver. He raises his hands, and his face goes as white as his tuxedo shirt.

  “Raus! Raus!” I shout. Get out! He scrambles from the car as the woman in the passenger seat does the same. I climb behind the wheel and launch the sedan forward as soon as Terrance clears the door. More shrieking as bodies dive out of the way. I floor the gas through the turn and race down the hill.

  Classical music is playing, a tinkly, pretty piece, Mozart maybe. Terrance fumbles with the controls, trying to turn it off. It blares loudly for a second, then disappears.

  At the end of the driveway, left takes us farther into the Zurich residential neighborhoods, and right takes us to the city itself. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I jerk the wheel to the right.

  The sedan is powerful and fast, but it’s also very large. It charges down precariously winding streets that have a habit of becoming suddenly narrow without warning. Headlights are following us a block or so behind. I can hear the SUVs crashing over speed bumps, their engines deep and throaty.

  “Where are we going?” Terrance shouts.

  “I don’t know,” I shout back. “Away.”

  “They’re Americans—those guys are Americans. Did you hear them?”

  I take a hard left through a red light, kicking the tail end of the Mercedes out behind us before it finds its footing and roars forward. A car coming up behind me swerves and nearly crashes into a truck going the other direction.

  “They want me, not you,” I yell. “I’ll get to the city, we split up, got it?”

  “No. Never. Not a chance. I’m not leaving you alone with them.”

  “Goddammit, Terrance, listen to me.” I see the SUVs rounding the corner we’d just taken and coming up hard on the little sedan. “They’ll be searching the Zurich stations. So take a taxi east, don’t use the trains until you get to a small town. Then keep going.”

  Up ahead, an intersection with a wide multilane boulevard. We have the green light now, but when it turns red, we’ll be trapped. I stomp down on the gas pedal and the burst of speed presses us back in the seat. The SUVs behind us see it, too, and do the same.

  Yellow.

  Brake lights pop up on the cars in front of us. I swerve into the lane for traffic going the opposite way. Cars panic and veer to the side; some collide with the dead crunch of steel on steel.

  Red.

  I press the gas all the way and rocket forward. Traffic is starting to creep into the intersection. I flash my headlights, hammer the horn.

  Then we’re spinning, the world silent, and a mass of white clouds explodes in my face. Spinning three times, four, five. Something hits us from the opposite direction and we spin the other way. Terrance’s body is on mine, or mine is on his. This is, of course, the end, as I knew it would be. But better than whatever the boys in SUVs had in mind.

  I’m proud of that. Choosing this way. Not their way.

  Then motion stops, and the world becomes loud again.

  A horn sounding. No, several of them. Stuck that way, a maddening dissonant orchestra of cars braying as they die. The air bags are deflated now, a chalky mass of thin white plastic that I have to fight through to get out the window that’s no longer there.

  I land hard on the pavement, the side of my head striking the ground, but I drag myself to my feet and see Terrance on his feet, too, studying the blood pouring from his mouth, his eyes glinting in the glare of headlights.

  “Go!” I gasp at him. “Go!”

  So he goes, and I do too, shocked our legs work, shocked any part of us does.

  Traffic is piling up around us, cars edging forward, curious, then stopping, putting on their hazard lights. People are getting out, shouting at us, asking whether we’re okay. I shove past them, then hear screams behind me. I glance over my shoulder and see the men from the hotel in full sprint, pistols out.

  Terrance is ahead of me by three or four cars, his backpack flapping like an animal stuck to him, trying to break free. He dodges right, up another lane, then dodges right again and disappears along the side of a bus as it comes to a stop.

  I keep going forward, then a door opens in front of me and I launch myself onto the hood of a car, dash over the roof, and leap onto the hood of the station wagon behind.

  Two of the men do the same, their footfalls landing heavy on the steel and denting it as if they were giants wearing shoes of stone. I leap again, and this time my foot catches the hood wrong, and I’m tipping to the side. My face hits the windshield, cold glass through which I see a woman’s terrified face as she starts to scream.

  Part Three

  GWENDOLYN

  Twenty-Five

  My father and I sit together in the last row of the Air France flight from Algiers to Paris.

  A fat man sits next to us, fat fingers working fat wooden prayer beads over and over in an eternal loop. He smiles at me, black-and-gray mustache rising up at the corners like a bad guy’s eyebrows. In French, he tells me I look like his granddaughter.

  We had three seats when we came here.

  We’ll send her home in a few days, when the military police release the body. This from my dad’s boss, the woman I was told to call Ambassador Cassie. My arms were around my dad’s waist, head pressed to his hip, as the adults worked out the details.

  I look at the fat man and wonder how it’ll happen. Will they belt my mother’s body into a seat? Who’ll sit next to her?

  A scratchy announcement over the PA, first in French, then in Arabic, then in English. A collective groan from the passengers. Air France values your safety and appreciates your patience. It’s hot on the tarmac and hotter inside the plane. I smell everyone, onions and smoky clothes. The fat man smells of cologne and fruit.

  My father’s head is against the plastic window, face slack and unshaven and pocked with sweat. He looks at me from the corners of his eyes. What does it mean to look at someone this way? At age seven, I didn’t know.

  But now I do:

  I want to shoot myself—

  That look, finally decoded:

  And now I can’t.

  * * *

  Does one feel actual pain in a dream? Maybe one only feels the idea of pain. Maybe one only feels the fear of pain. So the actual pain, the specificity of the pain in my wrists and ankles, is maybe a clue that it’s not a dream at all.

  With no distinction between sleep and consciousness, the real and unreal, it’s important I keep doing this, formulating sentences. Sentences with words that mean things, with words that refer to concepts, concepts that refer to the reality of the world I know exists, or existed, before this.

  It’s starting again.

  A vanishingly small musical note—violin? no, electronic, computer-made—lasting no more than a half second. It’s in my left ear. A single note, a high-pitched fa. Normal. As far as these things go.

  A few seconds later, another note. Fa-sharp, also in my left ear.

  Sweat rolls down my skin. I clench everything that can be clenched. My body shivers. The teeth on my limbs gnaw.

  Start counting, I tell myself.

  When I make it to three, there’s a re in my left ear. I start over, and this time make it to seven before I hear ti-flat. At thirteen, another ti-flat.

  It helps if I count off the time between tones. Even if there’s no order to them, at least I can measure it, or come close. It works for a while.

  Until it starts in the other ear.

  A louder mi comes from the right, overlapping a do from the left. I try to maintain a separate count for each ear but have to give up right away. It’s too hard.

  In moments, the notes are all over the place. High and low. Long and short. Quiet and loud. Well-spaced and right up against one another. The randomness is what makes it impossible to keep count or even hold on to a thought. It is designed—I am certain of this—to make analysis impossible, to render the
mind unusable.

  Hours of this. Or so it seems. But I need to be clear: The duration isn’t the important thing. The tortures—nightmare, hallucination, madnesses, of which the sound-chaos is the mildest—start and stop randomly. It’s that randomness that’s the important thing. The thing that really gets you.

  In between the tortures, there are pauses, intermissions. Darktime, I call it, a period of absolute lightlessness, absolute unlight. It’s a featureless nonexistence, but at least there’s space for me to build thoughts again. With time—if that’s how darktime is measured, and not in centimeters or grams or some other dimension—I learn a trick.

  Memory. It exists still.

  It may, in fact, be the only real thing left.

  * * *

  My mom and dad, snoring in the bed of Pension Alexandra’s room 33, beneath the eiderdown, a cold morning in fall, or maybe winter. I bound up onto the bed.

  Dad groans, rolls away.

  Too early, says Mom.

  So I climb under the eiderdown between them, warmth radiating from both sides, a pocket for tiny me.

  Light comes through the window, gray turning white. Snow today? Sunshine? It doesn’t matter here beneath the eiderdown.

  A fart—no sound, just smell. Last night’s dinner. I make a gagging noise.

  Goddammit, Will! My mom swings her arm over me, crashing her fist into my dad’s shoulder.

  His body shudders and he lets out a pained Ow! He turns over, and the two of them face each other, big Mount Rushmore faces looming on either side of me. Wasn’t me, he protests.

  So I giggle, pull my nightgown up over my mouth.

  I keep it together, just enough to say, Mine.

  Tickling.

  * * *

  Then the darktime ends with the wailing of a baby.

  It is wailing of a particular quality: pissed, frantic, in pain. It hits me in the lizard brain lurking at the center of my mind—save it, save it before it dies—a biological imperative, a human must. And this would be bad enough if the wailing were just as described. But it is not just as described, not quite.

  Because the wailing is backward. It begins at demonic peak-wail and gets sucked in reverse into the baby’s mouth, as in a vortex, a black hole of suffering. And there’s so much of it, the sound going on and on, all the pain in the world, whistling through a tiny hole.

  Somebody help her.

  The sweat pours now, along with a sensation like the crawling of a billion insect feet over my skin. I twist and writhe, trying to avoid what happens next, the thing that always happens next.

  Images fill my vision, so bright that even when I close my eyes, they’re still somehow there. It’s an illusion, must be.

  A knife pressing into a man’s throat.

  Time lapse of a human corpse decaying to bone.

  A child on a swing, slow motion, face ecstatic.

  Knife again, a close-up, hitting the carotid.

  A woman’s mouth, open in orgasm.

  Sewage flowing down a hill.

  A human tongue being pierced by the stinger of a wasp.

  Time lapse again, sunflower blooming.

  Sewage flowing.

  Knife.

  Mold.

  Child.

  Knife.

  And through it all, the backward baby.

  * * *

  Rain, so much of it. Right there—two, three feet away. Splattering against my red Doc Martens and the legs of my jeans. It’s chilly here in the entryway of the East Village tenement. It forms a nook, an eddy, for the wind, and a flyer for a DJ’s performance swirls around us. I should be cold, shivering, but I’m not. Someone is holding me.

  His name has a number in it. Terrance Mutai the Fourth. Spelled, no doubt, capital-I capital-V. Roman numerals, to make them fancier. What are you, royalty? I ask.

  I’m the same as you, he answers. We’re both royalty.

  Of what? I say.

  King and queen of this, he says.

  The tenement entryway, he means. Or maybe all of New York. Or maybe just of our lives. Which are ours. Which are ours alone. To do with as we please.

  A cab comes—how unlikely that is in New York, in the rain—and we climb into the backseat of our royal carriage, yellow as the sun. Up the boulevard we travel, past diners and bodegas and mattress stores. I dread the climbing of the street numbers, Forty-Fifth Street turning to Forty-Sixth turning to Forty-Seventh, which means we’re getting closer to my apartment.

  Terrance the Fourth rubs my hands, red from the cold, while his are always just brown and beige-peach and warm and so much bigger than mine, with long, aristocratic fingers. We’re strangers to each other, but we already know everything that’s important.

  The cab pulls to the curb.

  He kisses me.

  We’ll be together, he whispers, until the day we die.

  * * *

  Maybe I need to rethink my original premise. Maybe the dream-or-real binary is the wrong binary. Maybe the binary I should be looking at is alive-or-dead.

  If that’s the case, then the answer is obvious:

  I’m dead.

  And this is hell.

  I’ve done enough to deserve it. There’s no question. A stack of bodies that would make a psychopath pucker and look away. The corollary to this conclusion is that it’s not a human hand orchestrating my current state but a divine hand. And the corollary to that corollary is that I’d miscalculated, badly, since the age of seven, and there is a god after all.

  I don’t know if it’s some human-shaped infinity with a beard, some Yahweh or another, or some Baal or Athena or Gaia. All I know is that it’s someone whose job it is to weigh souls and punish those found wanting.

  And, lord, have I been found wanting.

  Lusting, actually. Greeding. Greed for money that wasn’t mine. Greed for a life that apparently wasn’t mine, either. Win at any cost, I’d said. Well. I’d won. And here’s the cost.

  The tortures, the sound-chaos and the images and the wailing babies, they’re part of what makes this hell hell. But only a part. The memories aren’t there as darktime respites from the bad stuff. The memories have a didactic purpose and torture of their own: Look what you had; look what you wasted. Nineteen years of stuff, from the nasty to the neutral to the sublime, cast into the incinerator, and for what?

  I imagine that at some point I’ll run out of memories, and every one of them will become an old and stale rerun. After ten years of this, cycling through them will be exhausting. After a million, it’ll be unbearable.

  The problem with infinity is that getting through it takes forever.

  * * *

  He’s dancing, whirling madly. Like an idiot, my dad. Our apartment in—where was it now?—Cairo. I’m a child, tenish, sad. To cheer me up, he plugs his phone into the stereo and cranks it all the way.

  They say love awaits us all, high up in the sky

  Where heaven’s open to all God’s children if we try

  He spins, arms extended, face grinning fiendishly, a pirouette, an attempt at a pirouette. The song, the sappiest of sappy 1970s folk-kitsch, a multicultural chorus of gleaming smiles.

  Wouldn’t it be nice, if we all could learn to fly

  Wouldn’t it be sweet, if we could sail up in the sky

  The rug in our living room—the red and orange and blue Kilim he bought from the Souk al-Gomaa—binds up around one stocking foot. His arms wave frantically and he falls, kwa-lumph, on the parquet floor. I laugh. Hard. Harder than I ever laughed before. He lifts his head and I see a little creek of blood at his hairline.

  We’d fly together to heaven’s gate, you and I

  Chasing peace, love, and happiness through the sky

  He’s hurt; I’m panicked. Then he laughs, too. My dad wipes away the blood—just keeping it interesting, he says, nothing to worry about—and gathers me up, pressing his face to my tummy and blowing bluuuuuuuumph through my cotton T-shirt. I laugh again; it’s been years since the last bluuuuuuuumph
, and laugh and laugh until it hurts and he holds me. I had to throw the T-shirt out, though, because of the blood on it.

  A groovy flying pair of fools gettin’ high

  As we soar high, so high …

  For the sake of human scale—measured in rotations of the Earth around the sun, then in rotations of the Earth on its axis (365 units and 24 units, respectively)—I was dead for seventeen days, thirteen hours. That’s a made-up number. It might have been four days and eighteen hours, or thirty years and one hour, or just one hour. But for the sake of making it specific—long enough to be long, short enough to not be forever—I’ll call it seventeen days, thirteen hours.

  It happens painfully, and all at once, my head bursting into the sterile and very white light of a hospital room. It smells of disinfectant here, in this world.

  But the obvious metaphor of birth is just an obvious metaphor and, as such, unhelpful. Because that’s where the similarities end.

  A woman, early forties, dark hair pulled back into a ponytail, stands next to my bed. In her hands is a helmet. It is large and full, to cover the ears, and there’s an opaque visor that covers the eyes. Even now, so immediately after my second birth, or my un-death, whatever, I know that this helmet had been the universe I’d lived in, the source of maddening tones and ghastly sights and that fucking reverse baby.

  There is a generic quality to the woman, a plainness in her blandly pretty features and neutral makeup and navy blue suit. Her gold earrings are shaped like seashells, a touch of suburban whimsy. She is the mathematical average.

  And it’s this that confuses me at first. There is something in her I recognize, a specificity, as if she were the most average of average, and that’s what makes her unique. Where? A stock photo in the lobby of a bank? Meet your friendly loan officer. A commercial for a tasty yogurt? Even busy moms find time to indulge. No. Nothing so bland as any of that. There is, emanating from her like a perfume, a kind of menace.