The first thing he saw when he woke up was the bear, in the crib, pressed against the bars, like it was watching him. He realized, with a dull fury, that his wife must have gotten up once he was asleep and gotten the bear out of the trash and put it back in the crib. It had been a bad idea to purchase the bear in the first place, he told himself. At the time it had just seemed like a joke, and it would have been a joke if their child had survived. But considering all that had happened, it had been a very bad idea.
He thought about going down and yelling at her about it, but wasn’t that exactly what she wanted? No, he told himself, he would handle it like a grown-up: he would pretend not even to have seen the bear. He would simply put it back in the trash where it belonged, and then, since today was trash pickup, stay home long enough to make sure it was taken away. That would be the end of the bear. They wouldn’t have to think about it anymore. They could go on with getting back to the way their lives had been.
And indeed, he managed to do all that. He showered, had some breakfast. He took a bowl of cereal in to his wife, but she was still asleep—or perhaps pretending to be asleep so she wouldn’t have to speak to him. He kissed her on the cheek and then went upstairs and got the bear and put it, heart now beating, in the trash can. Then he got into his car and waited there behind the wheel in the driveway until he saw in the rearview mirror the garbage truck arrive, the mechanical arm pick up and dump the can. There, he thought, starting up the car, over and done.
And that might have been the end of it. In normal circumstances it would have been. When he came home that night, he apologized to his wife and she apologized to him. She cried, and he had the decency, if that was what it was, not to accuse her of bringing the bear back into the house. And she, in turn, had the decency not to acknowledge that he had put the bear back in the trash again. She promised to make more of an effort, and he promised to be more patient. In short, they did all the things that each half of a couple does, out of fear or out of love, after being afraid of having gone too far.
But that was not the end. Three nights later, or four, when Michael had let his guard down, when he was beginning to feel that they were returning to their normal life, he again awoke in the middle of the night knowing he had heard something.
No, he thought, still mostly asleep. Just imagining it. Dream.
He tried to go back to sleep, he really did, but the sound wouldn’t let him. Not a sound, really. More the ghost of a sound. But it would not leave him alone. Slowly, it began to fill him with dread.
He got out of bed. He listened in the bedroom, but the sound wasn’t coming from there. He listened in the living room, even though he knew the sound wasn’t there either. He listened everywhere in the house except for where he expected the sound to be coming from and then, in the end, he went to listen there too.
He opened the door to the nursery. Yes, there it was, the sound was here, the faint beating of a heart. There was the bear, in the crib, just as it had been for months now. But how had his wife gotten the bear back? Had it somehow gotten caught in the can and hadn’t been thrown away? Had it ended up not making it into the garbage truck, and she’d found it in the street? There must, he hoped, be some logical explanation.
He turned on the light and stared at the bear through the bars. The heart now had stopped, just as suddenly as it had begun. The bear, he saw, was filthy, covered with a layer of gray dust as fine as ash. He would have to destroy it, but before he did, he felt his wife owed him an explanation. He would wipe the bear off and then show it to her, get her to explain, and then, in front of her, he would destroy it.
But when he picked it up to clean it, he realized something had changed. The bear felt different now, heavier, and when he moved it something seemed to sift through its body, as if it was now filled with sand. He moved it closer to his face and sniffed it and realized that no, its covering wasn’t an ashy layer of dust, it was simply ash. And when, making a face, he laid the bear on the changing table to wipe it clean, he realized where the ash had come from. The lid was loose on the urn, a scattering of ash spilled around its base, and when he looked in, he realized it was mostly empty.
His limbs felt very heavy. He could see, now that he was looking for it, where the seam in the fabric had been torn open and clumsily unstitched to fill the bear with his daughter’s ashes. Things were, he suddenly knew, much worse than he’d realized.
Trying to think, he opened the urn and held it just under the edge of the changing table, slowly sweeping the loose ash into it. Then he put it back on the table and began to unpluck the new seam on the bear.
As soon as he did, the heart began beating again. And then, in a way he didn’t understand and found he never properly could describe later to the police when they were questioning him as to the death of his wife, the bear smiled at him.
He pulled his hand back as if bitten. He stared at the bear. This is the moment, he thought hopefully, when I wake up.
But he did not wake up. He was already awake. And as he reached out again, this time to tear the head off the bear that had stuffed itself with his child’s ashes and that contained a sonic replica of her heart, he had no way of knowing that this would be the last moment when he still felt as if he had control of his life, that from here on out, things would only get worse.
Scour
1.
When the rain came it was not rain at all, but a pale scouring dust or sand. They watched it strip the paint off the car and slowly grind the windscreen opaque. For a while he kept driving, though he couldn’t really see the road and kept slipping off it and back on. But then dust started seeping through the vents and the car died.
“What do we do?” she asked.
“Do?” he said. “What can we do but wait?”
“We have to get out of here,” she said.
“No,” he claimed. “We have to wait.”
And yet, he was the one—after an hour, after perhaps two, the air of the cab already grown stifling—to open the door and step out.
By the morning the storm had died down somewhat, and by the time the sun was high overhead, it had stopped entirely. She had to force the door through the grit to get it open and then saw more grit piled all around the car, in drifts against it. She found the remains of a body 100, maybe 150, meters away, but it was so scoured and stripped of flesh and clothing she could not be sure it was his. Probably it was, she told herself. She left it where it was.
She regarded the sky, but there seemed to her no way to tell if the storm would return. And the landscape too was so flattened and beaten down that if it did return, there was no place to hide. Which way to go? Perhaps in the direction the car was pointing, unless they had gone off course in the storm. But if not there, where?
She set off, traveling as quickly as she could, the landscape unvarying and flat, never changing, revealing nothing. Still, she kept walking, kept on.
When the wind began to rise, she started to panic. There was still no sign of shelter, no place to hide. The dust, or sand, if it was either dust or sand, began to rise in flaccid tourbillions around her, almost immediately collapsing but staying aloft a little longer each time. Her skin began to sting. She started to run. And when it became clear running wasn’t enough, when the grit had begun to eat away at her face and arms and eyes, she fell to her knees and burrowed as quickly as she could, digging through the sand, trying to cover her head and chest and yet somehow preserve a space to breathe. And even though she felt the grit strip the shirt from her back and then flay off strip after strip of skin, she stayed balled and folded in on herself, concentrating on breathing in the small space of air between her hands and her knees, until she passed out.
That was how they found her. They lifted her unconscious body up and carried it across the waste for several hours, and she did not wake up. They stopped and tried to feed her, but she would not swallow food. They eased the spout of a water skin between her lips and massaged her throat, and finally she did swallow some�
�her throat convulsed, in any case. And it was for this, and only this, that they did not leave her to die.
II.
When she awoke, it was days or perhaps weeks later. She was in a shelter, a room of some sort, and for a moment she thought she was back again in the car, but the shape of the space around her was wrong. But she told herself, No, it’s the car, that it was her vision that was wrong. And yet the colors were wrong as well. It was not the car. No, definitely a room.
She was lying on a bed, she finally determined. The room was dingy and low-ceilinged, and only barely bigger than the bed. More like a cell than a room. She climbed out of the bed and went to the door to see if it was locked. Or would have done so, anyway, had she not been strapped to the bed.
For a while, she shouted. Nobody came. She shouted some more, then tried simply asking for someone to release her. Nobody came. Then she lay in bed and tested the strength of her straps. She tried to wriggle out of them without success. Then she just lay there, not doing anything. Then she fell asleep.
When she awoke, a chair had been brought in, crammed into the narrow space between bed and wall. A man was sitting in it, smiling. He looked somewhat like the man she had lost, the man who had been driving and who had then left the car. But it was not him: he had different eyebrows. And maybe other things different about him as well.
“Hello,” the man said, the new man, his voice vaguely friendly. He held his hands neatly in his lap.
Many things she could possibly respond with rushed into her head. Who are you? for instance. Where am I? for instance. What am I doing here? for instance. Am I a prisoner? Or Release me this instant. Or.
She said none of them.
“Hello,” she said.
The man smiled. “I’m sure you have a lot of questions,” he said. “For instance, who am I? Where are you? What are you doing here? Are you a prisoner? I must ask you, for the moment, to be patient, to wait.”
She closed her eyes. This man, or any man, for that matter, shouldn’t be able to say so directly what was in her head. Is this a dream? she wondered. Am I dreaming?
When she opened her eyes, the man was still there. He had removed his hands from his lap and was now resting them lightly on one of her arms. For a moment she couldn’t think if it was her right or left arm. Am I dead? she wondered.
“Doing all right?” he asked, then he smiled again before she could respond. “Of course you are,” he said. “Why wouldn’t you be?”
“Where,” she finally managed to say, “where am I?”
He applied a little pressure to her left or right arm. “Hush,” he said. And then, after a long moment, said, “You’re here.”
But where? she wondered. Where’s here?
III.
In time the man, or a man very much like him but still not exactly like the man who had been driving, loosened the straps. She was allowed to chafe her wrists until the numbness left them. And then the straps were tightened again.
The first time this happened she resisted and then another man, nearly identical to the first and second, came in and pressed her shoulders hard into the bed while the other tightened the straps. He bared his teeth at her while he did it. After that she let them tighten without resisting.
And then that too stopped. One day one of the men loosened the straps and did not tighten them again. And then he left.
For a while she lay in the bed chafing her wrists, but then all the feeling she could stand was back in them, and she saw no reason to chafe them further.
She got out of the bed. Her legs were weak and looked like sticks rather than legs. She could not walk far, but she could walk as far as the door and put her hand on the doorknob and twist it.
Only it wouldn’t twist. It was locked.
And then one day it was not locked. She twisted the doorknob and the door came open, and she saw that it led into a simple, unadorned hall.
The first day she simply looked out into the hallway and then closed the door and returned to sit on the bed, her hands held motionless in her lap like two dead birds.
A man came, just as a man came every day, and gave her some food, sitting in the chair crammed beside the bed as she ate. Then, when she was finished, he took her bowl and spoon away and carried them toward the door.
As he opened the door and closed it behind him, she waited, listening for the sound of his keys jangling, for the sound of the lock tonguing into its groove. This was a difficult moment for her, and she all but cried out. But she heard no sound, and though she feared this merely meant he had one key and thus it would not jingle, that the lock was freshly oiled and as silent as a fish in deep water, when at last she could bring herself to stand and again twist the doorknob, she found it was still unlocked, and she was flooded with relief.
Or at first she was flooded with relief. For she began to think to herself that if they had left the door unlocked, it was because they wanted her to go through it, that it was a trap of some kind.
Or maybe, she told herself, they had made a mistake not once but twice, so that tomorrow the door would again be locked, and locked forever from then forward.
Or maybe, she told herself, I am not a prisoner at all.
But nevertheless, trapped between these possibilities, she found herself for several hours hesitating between staying in the room and exiting. In the end she succeeded only in stepping briefly into the hall and looking down it, first in one direction and then in the other.
The hall was poorly lit. It looked the same to her in either direction and seemed to go on as far as she could see. After a few minutes, she came back in and shut the door again and then sat on the edge of the bed, waiting.
What she was waiting for she didn’t know, but whatever it was it didn’t come. Or if it did come, she didn’t recognize it.
They kept coming to her room, just as they had before, bringing her food, bringing her water, sitting in the chair crammed alongside the bed. They all looked the same to her, or nearly the same, and she was unaware of how many had care of her. Maybe just two or three, though perhaps several dozen.
They would come and they would go and then she would go to the door and pass through it into the hall and look first in one direction and then the other. Then she would return to the room and lie down on the bed and wonder what exactly was wrong with her, why she couldn’t bring herself to leave.
IV.
And then one day, if it was day, the men did not come. She waited for them to bring her food, and they did not bring her food. Perhaps, she thought to herself, something in my head has slipped and I am confused about time. And so she waited. She waited for them to bring her water, and they did not bring her water. It was only when her throat was parched and her tongue sticking to her teeth that she admitted to herself that no, something in her head had not slipped, that the problem was outside, was with them. The problem was they had abandoned her.
How often in my life have I been abandoned? she thought, and could not help but think that abandonment was a word jotted not just on one or two moments of her existence, but scrawled heavily across her life as a whole.
She thought again of the man in the car and how he had driven with her for miles, and of how, without explanation, after having first prevented her from doing it herself, he had stepped out of the car and abandoned her, and died.
Only what if he had been trying not to abandon her, but save her? What if he had left the car so there would be air enough for her? So that she would survive? Did it make a difference? He had still abandoned her, hadn’t he, even if only to save her?
And who was to say the same hadn’t happened to these men as well? If she were to go down the hall, would she find them, bodies scoured or stripped or broken, dead for her sake without her knowing why? She was, she finally realized, afraid of going down the hall. Afraid of what she would see.
Such thoughts, she thought. But they had already begun to feel as if they did not belong to her.
V.
And
then at a certain point she either died or seemed to die, and she was never in a position after to say which, if either, it was. Perhaps her life drained out and was gone and then, slowly, replaced by something else. Or perhaps she slipped from one level of life to another, then yet another, becoming slowly less and less present but still managing to persist. It did not matter which it was. What mattered was what seemed to become of her.
After this she could not move, except for her eyes. What became of her was that she was in a room, or thought she was. Only the room at times had no walls and indeed seemed to breathe and flex from being a room to being, simply, the outside. A steady rain was falling—or what she thought was a steady rain but feared instead would be, if she looked too closely, a pale scouring of dust or sand.
But no, when she was outside, it was rain, cool against her face. And when she was in the room, it was nothing at all.
And soon there was nothing more than that, a coolness against her face and then nothing at all, back and forth, back and forth, less and less of both each time, slowly vanishing but never quite gone, and she too going with it. What can I do? a scrap of herself wondered. Do? another scrap answered. What can you do but wait?
A Collapse of Horses Page 14