The Comedown

  Her mother stayed this way for days: not sleeping, not eating, not letting her father near. She mumbled in a nonsense language about her feet sticking to earth while her head was in heaven. She told Netta to count everything in the house and see if it was an even number or odd—when her father objected, she made a little cut in her right arm with a knife. That was her father’s limit.

  She went to the hospital for a week and came back angry-eyed and puffy-cheeked. She now took three pills a day and spoke to no one. Netta understood that she was well enough to go back to work at the clinic—which she did—but couldn’t tell whether the mother she knew would remain wedged deep inside whatever this new woman was, this flat-haired woman who breathed slowly and sighed loudly and hissed that she wanted to die.

  The time Netta’s father used to spend with Netta’s mother talking and laughing he now spent with Netta: he watched TV while she drew a picture at his feet, he ate long dinners with her while her mother slept, he read her a bedtime story and she woke up in the middle of the night to find he was still there, reading a book of his own. Netta knew that this meant he was scared, which scared her more, because what did you do when the people who knew the most about the world became frightened of it? What hope did she have, knowing nothing? She drew pictures of a dark-eyed dog, a floating house, a crying bird. Everyone who saw the drawings said she was gifted. Before, her father would have smiled wide and said they should all get her autograph before she got famous. Now he just looked down at the ground and rubbed her back, so she said, “Thank you for the compliment.”

  It went like this: her mother got better enough to wake up early and stay up until after dinner, started taking Netta in her lap again. There were no more stories, though Netta held out hope, and then her mother would get sick again. One night they were eating dinner and her mother dropped her fork and said the room was getting tight. Netta looked in her mother’s eyes and cried out in panic, and her father pulled her to him and put a hand over her mouth. Her mother flung her plate and stomped around the kitchen, shouting at whatever else was in the room to stop making so much noise. She went to the hospital again and came back a week later with a different handful of pills. Forty days later, it happened again. And thirty days after that. Netta felt worry like bugs in her stomach, crawling up its walls and buzzing with hatred.

  They took Netta’s mother to see Michel, who’d been Netta’s father’s roommate in college. Michel was studying for his doctorate in biochemistry at the University of Chicago, which made him the unofficial family doctor. Even though he was the same age as her father, Michel looked ten years younger, light-skinned with sandpapery hair. He had a bendy face that Netta liked and wide ears that he could wiggle whenever he wanted—when he wiggled them he raised one eyebrow, too, and even Netta’s mother laughed. He never tried to cure Netta’s mother. Netta wasn’t under the illusion that he could. Instead he spoke with her about modern medicine, long conversations that Netta listened to as she pretended to watch TV and her father dozed on the sofa behind her.

  “By the time I die, I don’t want there to be any room left in the world for nonscientific belief,” Michel had said one night, and Netta heard her mother make the nodding sound she made when she agreed. “I want people to have come to their senses, to exist as rational agents in a totally knowable world.”

  His words seemed important: rash on all agense in no ibble world.

  “Is it totally knowable?” her mother asked, and Netta recognized the challenge in her voice, a tone she only took with someone she respected. “Is science the end?”

  “The end of what? Of all knowledge?” Netta felt Michel move behind her so she was sitting propped up against his side. “Of course it is. You should open a door and there should be nucleotides standing behind it, and behind that door atoms, and behind that door subatomic particles.”

  “I know there should be, but I’ve seen things I can’t ignore.”

  “You’ve seen things?” He laughed.

  “Yes,” her mother said. “I’ve seen things that shouldn’t be real only to me.”

  Michel was silent then. He ran one of his big, goofy hands over Netta’s head, which for some reason made her shudder.

  Netta’s mother lost her job and they had to get a smaller apartment. Michel found them a beige-walled one in Rogers Park, close to Loyola, where her father tutored. When Michel showed it to them, Netta’s mother walked around with her hands folded over her stomach—thickening since she’d left the hospital; her cheeks and thighs, too—and squinted her eyes and shook her head, looked at Netta, and whispered, “Seven steps down,” which made Netta feel prickly and nervous. Within two weeks they were living there.

  During the gray time after Netta came home from school and before her father came home from work, she was trapped alone with her mother, who would wail about ghosts Netta couldn’t see no matter how hard she tried. One night, she turned on the faucet in the sink and splashed the water at Netta and asked her if this water didn’t contain hundreds of spirits, if Netta couldn’t feel them screaming in the air, landing prickly on her skin. By then it had been more than a year and a day since her grandmother’s death, and Netta didn’t know where her spirit had gone. But her mother’s blank face and low whine made her anxious, and she said yes, she could feel every spirit.

  “I want to die,” her mother said, and walked slowly from the room into her bedroom.

  Two days later, Netta’s father was already home when she got back from school. He said her mother was in the hospital again. He made Netta a grilled cheese and they watched cartoons together and he told her during commercials that her mother would be cured for good now. Her mother stayed in the hospital for thirty days and Netta felt the apartment brighten from dark green to the purple she sometimes saw on the undersides of clouds during sunsets, felt her body get lighter, felt herself paying attention to the kids she was meeting at her new school. There was Leticia, who was pure pink, and Satvika, who was orange-red, and Elise, who was bright blue. Satvika once punched a steel-colored boy who called Netta a dirty monkey. Netta went to sleep at night thinking of them and felt a flush of orange the color of Satvika’s name as she slid into dreams.

  But sometimes when Netta was falling asleep, a dark green thought would come with an image of her mother in it, and Netta’s eyes flickered open and her heart pounded hard. No, no, no, no. Eyes open or closed, she couldn’t get rid of the dark green, where the floating image of her mother said, “I loved you so much, so why couldn’t you love me back?”

  “I loved you too!” Netta said, then caught herself: “I love you! I love you!”

  But her mother, bathed in the dark green in her mind, just shook her head and cried, and Netta would wake crying, too.

  When her mother did come back, she was flat again, had pills again—more than she’d ever had before. The doctors said she had a sickness in her mind and that she would always have to take the pills if she wanted to stay healthy.

  After that, her mother didn’t get sick again. But she also never went back to being the laughing-eyed woman who sat Netta on her lap. Her face looked longer, her posture better, her whole person shifting from yellow to off-white in Netta’s mind. She had never cared about safety from beggars or the poor before, but now she did, instructing Netta to stay away from anyone who looked dirty or homeless. She said those people had fallen like they had for a reason, and that they would bring Netta down with them if she let them. She told Netta to be proud of who she was and not give white people a reason to hate her the way those beggars had. She got a job at the Loyola cafeteria.

  After ten-year-old Netta drew the picture of Marlon she drew one of her mother’s poems, two stanzas about how important it was to be clean. It started out as one of the Queen of Hearts’ guards from the Alice in Wonderland movie: a playing-card body and a snooty white face. Then she drew a businessman’s suit buttoned over his flat card-body. She gave him a mustache. She gave him a hat. She changed the sword in his hand to a scepte
r, then a walking cane. She put expensive Nikes on his feet. Then she erased a hole in his center so it looked like he’d been shot. Beneath him she wrote: “I am so pure, I am so good / I am the noblest dickhead, in all the hood.”

  1990–2004

  Chicago

  She grew up and did well in school, managed to get into a magnet school on the North Side (to her delight, so did Satvika and Elise—Leticia went to a Catholic school in the suburbs), won a scholarship to study figure drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She did all this by ignoring her mother, who grew fat and bitter at Netta’s happiness. It had been her father who framed the drawings, who showed them to Michel. It had been Michel who had arranged for a showing at an arts and cultural center in Hyde Park, the kind of place run by well-intentioned middle-class people who thought pastels and parchment paper were real antidotes to the city’s gun violence. It had been Michel’s friend Peter who’d seen Netta’s drawings and offered to mentor her at his South Side studio. And it had been Netta herself who made the drawings (ten to fifteen a week), who for four years had taken two trains and a bus every Wednesday to Peter’s garage-studio, where he taught her line, form, and contour, who had saved up the money she made working at the Indian restaurant on Devon to pay for pencils and charcoal and gummy erasers. Once a week Netta laid new drawings on the kitchen table for her father to admire.

  At SAIC Netta was called “beautiful for a black girl” and “exotic,” which made her feel a weird bluish violet she’d never felt before. She felt the need to make her adult body thinner than it already was, to wear the chokers and hair clips the other girls did. Satvika had left the city to go to college in Vermont and Elise and Leticia were both at DePaul. She tried to meet them for lunch in the Loop every other week, but by the winter of freshman year it felt as though they’d run out of things to talk about. Netta could tell with a navy-tinged sadness that they’d grown too boring and practical for her. Elise was studying to be a social worker and Leticia an accountant: they never had anything interesting to say, never attended any parties or gallery openings or concerts, and so relied on Netta to keep them updated on what drugs she’d tried and whom she was sleeping with, which exhausted her. She didn’t want her friends to live through her, hustling around in their boxy sneakers and fringe bangs and outdated lipstick, fat purses bulging with tissues. She canceled on them twice, three times—by the fourth time, they’d gotten the message. She still sent them birthday cards and added them on AOL chat, but they never talked much beyond an occasional “Hey.”

  Her friends at SAIC were Chloe and Danielle. Chloe was in fibers and Danielle was in fashion. They were both from the rich northwest suburbs and lived in massive condos on the Gold Coast: the doormen knew them by name, and their bedrooms had views of Lake Michigan. But they both considered Netta the most interesting person they knew. They called Netta the Queen, and Netta’s heart swelled and then shuddered in a way she didn’t want to understand. She spent long weekends in Chloe’s condo, which was the bigger of the two, and where there was weed and champagne and ecstasy. By the end of her freshman year Netta knew that ecstasy was her favorite drug, that rolling was one of her favorite things to do. The thin, bright faces of Chloe and Danielle would glow like white-hot klieg lights, divine and perfect, and their hands became the grabbing hands of playful children, eager and innocent, hugging Netta and holding her, offering her cheese and almonds, touching her cheeks and hair. She touched them back—all warm, all ecstatically warm and lovely, all bright mauve and rose and cyan, shifting like the blocks of color she remembered from her favorite Disney cartoons—and she felt loved and safe. She usually felt angry with her mother (and even a little with her father) for keeping her so sheltered. But when she was rolling she just pitied them, or collapsed on Chloe’s settee and cried for them, and Chloe and Danielle would be at her feet, asking her what was wrong, why someone so beautiful and perfect should be so sad. And then Netta’s tears would become tears of joy and she’d hug them to her, promise that she was crying because she was so incredibly happy, make them swear to only create beautiful things for the world’s most beautiful people and tell all their enemies to fuck off.

  “You’re amazing!” Chloe said.

  “You’re a poet-goddess!” Danielle said.

  And again the weekend after that, and the weekend after that.

  She slept with Chloe and Danielle separately a few times, then all together a few times. She had blue-and-gold orgasms that she hadn’t known were possible. She dated around in their friend group—white and Asian kids from Highland Park and Evanston and Lake Forest—and then got serious with Danielle’s best friend from high school, a bisexual performance artist named Greg who wanted to be called Elmer after some character in an old movie. One evening after he’d made her come twice during sex, Elmer said he’d never imagined himself getting serious with someone like her. Something about his words had given her the old bluish-violet feeling, but this time she knew it must be wrong, must be some ghost from the beige apartment rattling the cage she’d sealed it in long ago, because Elmer was smiling so kindly as he said it, running his hand up and down her thigh.

  Over winter break of their senior year, the six of them gathered in Chloe’s condo on Christmas Eve: Netta, Elmer, Chloe and her boyfriend Damien, Danielle and her boyfriend Luke. Chloe’s brother, Eric, a married architect in New York, had procured a drug called purple mox-c for her birthday. It was supposed to be twice as powerful as ecstasy. Chloe and Eric and Eric’s wife, Annette, had done it once in Manhattan on Chloe’s birthday, then Chloe and Eric had done it again during a family vacation to St. Maarten. The dark purple pills were stamped with yellow smiley faces. Chloe promised that she and Eric had done mox-c from this same batch, but no one really needed any reassurance. Elmer swallowed his without water, then tipped a glass to Netta’s lips so she could swallow hers. They kissed while the others cheered them on.

  Netta felt it first (she always did, the smallest and most sensitive): a fullness in her ears, a tightness at the front of her head. The feeling was so sudden and blunt that she tipped forward, hands at her chest, fearing she was having a stroke. She heard Elmer asking if she was all right, then Chloe, and her feet swam out of focus and a film crept up over her eyes. She imagined herself on a gurney in an emergency room, imagined Danielle and Chloe holding her hands as she lay comatose on an operating table, and she wished she’d spent the evening with her father like he’d wanted. She could picture him sitting in front of the TV in the living room in the houndstooth cardigan she’d gotten him last Christmas, wearing it all wrong with a pair of thick-waled corduroys, trying to read the newspaper. Then in the background “Wannabe” started playing; her parents were listening to the Spice Girls. She started laughing, felt something light and incredible fizz up from the tops of her thighs, a feeling close to an orgasm but not quite. When she sat up her eyes were clear and her mind was focused and she was singing “If you wanna be my lover, you gotta get with my fri-eends!” Danielle burst out laughing, then Chloe, then Luke. Elmer stood up and found Spice in a pile of CDs—which was in itself too perfect, too funny—and put it on Chloe’s stereo and Damien got up to dance. The dance seemed so spot-on, so touchingly for her, that Netta laughed and cried and said, “I love you! I can’t believe how much I love you!” and then Elmer was in her lap kissing her. When Netta looked up (just minutes later, she hoped) they were all kissing, the make-outs melting into one another, getting passed around like a cold. Luke held Damien’s hand as they kissed their respective girlfriends, then they turned and kissed each other and Danielle was coming to kiss Netta, so she pushed Elmer off her lap and opened her mouth for Danielle, and Elmer went to kiss Chloe.

  Danielle’s body on hers suddenly felt indistinguishable from her own, Danielle’s mouth so soft and her tongue so dexterous, and Netta imagined a womb’s skin closing over them, twins floating in amniotic fluid. She looked up (Danielle’s eyes were still closed) and the walls of the womb pulsed around h
er, the thrum-thrum of a mother’s heartbeat just inches from the top of her fetal head, and she thought how incredible it was, what a medical miracle it was that a black twin and a white twin could not only share a womb but also fall in love. She thought, Finally: a womb of their own! and laughed through the kiss (Danielle didn’t seem to notice or care, just shaped Netta’s lips back into a pucker with her own).

  An electric ding sounded from outside the womb’s walls and then a vibration from within, and Netta asked Danielle through the kiss if she’d brought her vibe to the party. Danielle pulled away just long enough to laugh and say how Netta was too perfect, too funny. The dinging and vibration pulsed again, then again, and Netta realized it was her mobile phone in her back pocket. She fished for it and put it on the couch next to them, thinking of how to stop it so she could go back to Danielle’s blue-gold mouth and the bright yellow feeling of those hands on her body, on her nipples (already hardening in anticipation of the sex she was sure she’d soon be having), and flipped it open to turn it off only for it to ding and vibrate again, “Dad” on the small screen.

  “Just one minute, love,” she said to Danielle. “I want to tell my dad how incredible he is.” And Danielle nodded and sat back patiently, looked over her shoulder at Elmer and Damien as they touched each other’s faces.

  When Netta picked up the phone and said, “Hey, Dad, I love you,” he was already talking. The way he was talking didn’t make sense—not for the night, not for this moment in the night—and she sat up and said, “Dad! Dad!” which made everyone stop what they were doing and look at her.