Body of Stars

by Laura Maylene Walter

  I slid the pill from the bag. I knew what bloodflower could do, how it could make me remember. If I remembered, then I might have something to share with the police. But I was scared. To remember would be to experience horror, to see something I couldn’t ever take back. Bloodflower could be dangerous, too. Addictive, unpredictable. I didn’t want to lose myself to it.

  And yet there I stood, pill in hand. The air in the room felt heavy, my senses battering against the decision I’d already made. I could do this. I could be strong.

  I placed the pill on the center of my tongue. At once, the taste of pine and snowy woods filled my mouth. I was so surprised that I closed my mouth and swallowed.

  My body tingled with light, with euphoria. I was energy itself, alive and singing.

  All at once, the aftertaste in my mouth changed. Instead of snow and pine needles, I tasted burning. The coals at a bottom of a grill. The ash from a campfire. The dank sharpness of singed hair. I gagged and coughed, but it was too late. The bloodflower had dissolved, leaving a lick of fire to drift through my veins.

  And I started to remember.

  Strategies for Reintegration: A 7-Stage Guide for Recovery and Rehabilitation

  Stage 5: Grappling with Memory. Now that you’ve graduated from the reintegration program, you may find yourself distracted by the question of what happened during your trauma event. While many patients are tempted to unearth their memories, this is an ill-advised strategy. Such memory mining results in pain and nothing more. Patients are advised to let the past go and to focus their energies on recovery and rebuilding their futures. Leave the darkness behind.

  18

  Those missing weeks shot past me in slips and flits, little pieces of memory as rough and sharp as the very pill I had swallowed.

  First I saw the shadows of the underground hiding spot I’d been led to, followed by a glimpse of the two men who had brought me into the basement. They pulled away quickly, leaving me standing alone in a cavernous space. I moved forward in a slow, floating gait. Before long, I found a doorway with a strip of light showing at the bottom. I drifted in that direction and pushed open the door soundlessly.

  Inside, I found a room with threadbare carpeting and wood-paneled walls. No furniture except a narrow bed pushed against the far corner. A young girl lay on that bed. She was thin and pale, her eyes hollow, but the rest of her glowed.

  I stepped forward. I was thinking back to that day Cassandra had changed, how much I’d wanted to touch her. I came closer, then closer, until I was nearly at the bed. The girl sat up to face me. Her hair was mussed around her face, her expression unknowing. She stared right through me. I was finally close enough to make contact with her, but the moment I grazed her skin I leapt back, feeling stung. My fingertip hummed with recognition.

  The girl on the bed was me.

  I blinked and found myself lying on that same bed. I wore a thin cotton tank top but nothing else, my legs curled to one side. I propped myself onto my hands and stared down at my changeling body. I was beautiful, a wild thing trapped underground.

  The palest light pooled into the room as someone entered. A man shut the door behind him and stood at the foot of my bed. This was it. A far-off voice in the back of my head urged me to look up, to study his face, to recognize him, but I couldn’t do it. I stared at the man’s gut, refusing to raise my eyes.

  He joined me on the bed. A patient tiredness overcame me, like this was so routine, so ordinary, that the event barely registered. When he lowered himself to me, I turned my head to the side. I felt ancient inside my own body.

  The light flickered. Time stretched to accommodate this moment, as if it were a horror wholly without end, but I refused to acknowledge it. I worked to erase what was happening, what was changing me every second.

  It went on until it didn’t. The sound he made at the end was one of agonized loss, and I lay still beneath him as he labored to catch his breath. By the time he finally moved his body from mine, I was so far outside of myself that I barely registered the lift in the mattress when he stood.

  “That’s too bad, about your brother,” he said as he began to dress. He nodded toward the markings on my ribs.

  I hated him, he disgusted me, I wanted to burn him alive. I fixed my gaze on his face and stared hard, memorizing every wrinkle, every flaw in his skin.

  “What do you think you’re looking at?” he snapped. His hands were shaking; his zipper jammed. “I’m not attracted to young girls—only women, after they’ve changed. That’s important. I don’t feel this way about my students.”

  So he was a teacher. I told myself to file that information away.

  “You can’t know how difficult this is,” he went on. “It’s like being a prisoner. Once you girls change, you’re irresistible.”

  I shifted on the bed so I could look at him. His face was bland, expected, universal. He was just a man.

  “Poor baby,” I said, my voice velvety. “Imagine the struggle.”

  He leaned down and wrapped his hand around the back of my neck, pulling me close. “I would stop if I could,” he breathed against my neck. “But I can’t. I’m human.”

  “You’re not,” I said.

  Later, when he came back into the room and pushed me down, I looked off to the side and pretended I was somewhere else. I was good at pretending.

  When I raised my eyes again, I saw a massive blueprint pinned to the wall. It was not a blueprint of a building but of my body: a more official and intricate version of how Miles had drawn me when we were children. All my predictions were there, including the ones on my left side.

  I was shaking. Even in that hallucination, I understood that my markings were no longer my own. I pressed my fists against my eyes and realized, with a start, that I had begun praying. My family was not religious, and we did not attend church. More surprising was that I was not praying to God, but rather to something I feared did not exist: the mythical blank girl. She appeared before me, flashing her hair, filling the room with a luminous glow.

  I stretched out my arms to make contact, but it was too late. That girl, if she had ever been real in the first place, was gone.

  * * *

  * * *

  I jerked awake. My head was swimming, my eyes watering. I struggled to stand and fell into a heap on the floor. After a few dizzy moments, I managed to make my way out of the room and crawl to the bathroom so I could vomit into the toilet.

  I threw up once, twice, three times, then jerked with dry heaves. I could still feel his skin against mine. I heaved and gagged, as if by emptying myself I could undo the past. Because what I had seen in that dreamlike state was true. I was confident the bloodflower hadn’t made me hallucinate or invent a false account—those images were unearthed memories, no more and no less.

  From my place on the bathroom floor, I lifted my head to gaze out the window. Hours had passed and now it was night, the stars visible because I hadn’t been able to turn on the bathroom light. In my imagination, the stars morphed into marking patterns and the sky flattened into a blueprint. My markings had been stolen. Who knew where they’d turn up: on flyers in sex shops, in an erotic comic book series, in the tarot. Men bought these items for the voyeuristic thrill of viewing real girls and their real markings. It only took a bit of money to claim the body of a girl.

  I was sick one last time. Once I finished, I rose to my feet. My body felt creaky and broken. I washed my mouth out in the sink and drank a glass of water. Finally, I swatted my hand along the wall until I found the light switch. At the sudden brightness, I lost sight of the stars outside. They remained only in my memory, arranged and unchangeable in their constellations.

  “Celeste?” Miles was outside the bathroom, knocking. “Are you all right?”

  I opened the door and looked at him blearily. He was holding Mapping the Future but lowered it once he saw my face.

 
“Come on,” he said. “You need to sleep this off.”

  He led me to my room, where he stood to the side as I crumpled into bed.

  “Some people take to bloodflower more than others their first time,” he said. “Don’t worry, it will wear off soon. Where’d you get it, anyway?”

  “Deirdre stopped by today.” I licked my dry lips. “She was acting strange. She thought she was being followed, and she had the idea you might have something to do with that.”

  An expression I couldn’t quite decipher crossed my brother’s face: Concern? Frustration? It vanished before I could decide.

  “Deirdre is troubled,” he said.

  “She said an inspector came to look at her arm,” I went on. I kicked the sheets around my feet to get more comfortable. “Which I found strange, because an inspector visited me in the hospital. Remember, I tried to tell you? She had my childhood file, and she examined my arm. I was halfway convinced it was a dream.”

  For a few seconds, Miles and I stared at each other. I was glad to see that his black eye had paled nearly beyond recognition.

  “That’s odd,” he said finally. “But maybe that’s the protocol with returned girls.”

  “Maybe.”

  I looked at Mapping the Future, which he had tucked under his arm. “I suppose you’re still taking interpretation classes with Julia.”

  “It’s more than that. Julia made me her apprentice. I never told you this, but she hasn’t charged me for classes for ages because she thinks I can actually make a career out of it.” He glanced at me, a quick self-conscious look like he expected me to laugh. “I know it’s unlikely, but I believe I’ll find a way to make this work. As long as I’m persistent.”

  I nestled deeper under the covers. “I wish I felt that way about my chances of becoming a psychologist.” I didn’t even try to hide the bitterness in my voice.

  “Hey,” Miles said. “You still have a solid future. You do. Remember that.” He touched my arm, but for once, this didn’t make me flinch. His touch felt respectful, professional. I could picture him in the future, working as an interpreter to help girls and women find their way.

  But that would never happen. He would barely get to be an adult, much less have a career. He would miss out on everything, and he still didn’t know. Surely I was doing a good deed by not telling him of his fate. By concealing the pattern on my ribs, I was protecting my brother and our family from the coming years of agony. It was better to have the grief arrive all at once in a single shock wave rather than in a slow, unbearable crescendo.

  “You should sleep,” he said. “Sleep is the best thing for you right now.”

  He pulled the quilt over my shoulders and snapped the light off, leaving me in the dark.

  * * *

  * * *

  In the morning, I stayed in bed for a long time after I woke, watching the sun grow brighter and brighter against the curtains. When I finally got up and showered, I scrubbed my skin, hard. I looked down and tried to grasp that this was the same body that existed in that wood-paneled room, that lay under a strange man. It seemed a terrible, unreal story I’d told myself, something completely beyond belief.

  My bruises continued to fade. Soon they would disappear entirely.

  I dressed in a dark, ankle-length dress topped with a black cardigan. I dried my hair and brushed it. I did not apply makeup. I buttoned the top button of the sweater, gave myself a last look in the mirror, and went downstairs.

  My mother was in the kitchen holding a banana with its top half peeled open. She watched as I slid into my shoes in the hallway.

  “I’m going to take a walk,” I said.

  She looked concerned. “By yourself?”

  “Mom. There’s nothing to worry about anymore.”

  She gazed at me unhappily. “I suppose you’re right.” She walked over to the trash and dumped the banana in, even though she hadn’t finished it. The sound it made when it landed echoed inside the trash can, the kitchen, my head.

  “I’ll be back soon, I promise.”

  I left. Outside, I felt my family and friends following me like phantoms. My parents would surely condemn what I was doing, but Marie might have offered her support if I hadn’t pushed her away. I wasn’t sure how Cassandra would respond; I was starting to wonder if I’d ever known her at all.

  I walked until the police headquarters loomed ahead of me, a blond-brick building with a maroon roof that looked like rust. Inside, I signed the log, writing New information in abduction case in shaky handwriting as my reason for the visit. Then I waited alone until an officer called my name. As he led me through the maze of cubicles, the other officers—all men except for a lone woman—glanced curiously at me. As if I were a lost child in their midst.

  I was seated at a table near the back of the room and left to wait again. The table was piled high with various documents: financial forms, school registrations, tax booklets, and both federal and nongovernmental employment applications. I sifted through that last stack until I found an application for the position of humanitarian ambassador.

  It was a simple application, front and back of a single sheet of paper. Any woman over the age of eighteen could apply, even those who’d once been abducted. The Humanitarian Global Alliance always needed more women willing to give up their personal lives to contribute to this cause, and it was an open secret that ruined women might be naturally inclined to help vulnerable girls.

  “Isn’t it wonderful,” Mrs. Ellis once told my health class, “isn’t it a relief that women in this country aren’t subjected to mandatory police inspections, and that they in fact have this choice to work for a global organization? We have truly come far.”

  At the bottom of the application, the annual salary was printed in tiny type. I stared at the figure, which seemed astronomical to me, and then folded the application and placed it in my bag. I did this covertly, quietly. It was a time when everything I did seemed tinted with shame.

  A detective finally strode in and greeted me. The best way I could describe him was that he was soft—pillowy stomach, doughy hands, broad face. His eyes were not unkind. He took a seat next to me.

  “What do you have for us today, Miss Morton?” he asked.

  I cleared my throat. This moment would have to make up for the university admission interviews I’d never have. This was my opportunity to be grown up, to showcase my worth.

  “I’m here about my case. I was abducted last month, and I was released from the hospital this week.” I paused, waiting. The detective did not have my file open before him. He was, in fact, empty-handed.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well. I thought you should know I have a new lead on the case.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. I recovered some memories. I was kept in a basement room with wood paneling. The man who held me there was a teacher. I remember his face.”

  The detective offered a sympathetic smile. “That’s very impressive, Miss Morton. And how, exactly, did you manage to recover these memories?”

  “That’s not important. What matters is I remember.”

  He was still smiling. “Let me guess. Bloodflower?”

  “I’m not so great at drawing,” I said, “but if you take me to a sketch artist, I could describe him.”

  He eyed me steadily.

  “Or we could do a lineup,” I suggested. “He’s a teacher for students about my age, maybe younger. If you round up some male teachers and bring them in, I could tell you if he’s there. I’d remember his face. I’m sure of it.”

  “Miss Morton.” His voice was gentle. “Memories recovered artificially, via illegal controlled substances, are not admissible. We can’t arrest someone based on that.”

  “But I’m telling you that I remember. I can picture his face right now.”

  “That’s not proof. I understand
how you must feel. Helpless. Angry. You’ve had a lot taken from you, and it can’t be easy to accept. It’s not fair, certainly.” He nodded sagely, as if it was a big sacrifice for him to admit how unjust my situation was. “But don’t drag yourself through even more emotional turmoil over this. If you were to enter a bloodflower memory into the official record, I’m afraid that would just embarrass you.”

  “Embarrass me?” My hands felt numb. I wondered if I was having a stroke, if I was about to die right there in the police station.

  “Let me tell you something,” he said. “These cases are horrible for us, too. To see girls ruined and not be able to do anything about it.” He shook his head. “But we can’t allow unreliable evidence. Can you imagine if we started locking up men left and right based on false accusations?”

  “They’re not false. They’re real.” I began to cry. “At least look into Chloe, the interpreter downtown. She works with trappers, she tips them off. If you investigate her, you might find this man.”

  “I’m surprised, Miss Morton, that you’d blame a woman in all this. Chloe isn’t the one who ruined you, is she? Blaming her won’t help.” He shook his head. “My advice is that you go home and get a good night’s sleep. Let your body and mind heal. You’ve been through a lot.”

  He stood up. The overhead lights reflected briefly off his badge, blinding me. I knew I was supposed to get up, too, to follow him out the door, but I couldn’t do it. I slumped deeper into the chair.

  “You’re making this harder on yourself,” he said in a low voice. “Come along now. I’ll walk you out.”

  I let him. I let him lead me by the elbow all the way through that maze of cubicles, where I refused to look at any of the other officers. The room was deadly quiet.

  Outside, the midday sun blazed; that year, the autumn turned unseasonably warm off and on for weeks. I peeled off the black cardigan and marched home at a brisk pace. Anytime I encountered a neighbor or passerby, I lifted my chin a bit higher. By the time I made it to my house, a jabbing pain shot through my neck.