The Smash-Up

by Ali Benjamin

  Red shoes landing hard, one leap, then another. Plaid flannel ripples behind her. Ethan knows Alex would be just a tiny bit less impulsive if she’d taken her red pill, but still: there is something exhilarating about this moment, this child, her energy and fearlessness. The sheer force of her will.

  Yes. Now he sees Zo. Green coat, Burn it all down. He feels light, like he’s being lifted above the crowd. He takes one careful step down the hill, then another.

  Alex ducks between two protesters facing off with signs held high in the air: The future is female, says one. Feminism is cancer, says another.

  At the bottom of the hill, an engine revs. Ethan shifts his gaze to the line of cars. One of the vehicles, the one revving its engine for a second time, is the truck he’s been seeing around town, the rusted pickup with the enormous flags and the bumper stickers. The driver’s-side window of the truck is down. To his surprise, Ethan recognizes the person sitting behind the wheel.

  It’s Jarrett K, from the UPS Store.

  Oh, Ethan thinks. Another puzzle piece of the world snaps into place. Of course. Of course that’s Jarrett’s truck.

  He’ll tell Zo about Jarrett, too, when this is all over. He’ll tell her that he’d known she wouldn’t have liked the guy, but he’ll also tell her about Jarrett’s lost friends, the kid’s sorrow. The way he reminds Ethan of the guys he grew up with. Ethan will tell his wife so many things, all of the things he hasn’t yet told her, and maybe tonight, Zo will dance again by the light of their bedroom window. If she does, he’ll sit up and watch. This time, he won’t drift off to sleep, he’ll watch until she’s done, until she crawls into bed next to him and he can feel her heat becoming his own.

  Ethan nears the bottom of the hill, he’s almost to the truck with the flags and the bearded kid whose four friends rode the comet, who were more real to him than real people, and it’s as if Jarrett can feel Ethan’s gaze, because he stops looking forward through his windshield, shifts his eyes directly to Ethan.

  Ethan nods at Jarrett, who offers a slow, serious nod in return. They are two humans acknowledging each other, two animals with monkey bodies, nodding their monkey heads as a kind of hello, but also as an acknowledgment of some bigger truth: the world is weird. It’s changing fast. They happen to have landed here together, at the same surreal moment in space and time. They are witnessing this weirdness together.

  Jarrett’s eyes return to the crowd in front of him. It’s hard to hear over the drumming, and the cowbell, the call and response, but yes, there’s the engine revving for a third time. And there must be a break in traffic at last, because Jarrett begins rolling forward.

  Something funny about the movement. Some anomaly. Hard to make sense of.

  No, wait. The traffic isn’t moving. It’s only Jarrett who’s moving. He’s cranking the wheel, moving around the car in front of him, even though there’s nowhere to go. There are people to the left, people to the right—signs, motion, commotion everywhere, but somehow that’s not stopping him. Jarrett’s over the curb now, two wheels on the green. Moving slowly at first, then faster.

  Too fast.

  There’s a fleeting moment where it’s Jarrett’s safety for which Ethan is alarmed.

  And then he understands. In a sudden rush, the stuff of nightmares, Ethan understands, and then he’s running, his long legs taking enormous strides downhill like he could possibly stop this, but he loses his footing. He gets up, tries to run and falls again, and now it’s too late, he’s helpless to do anything but watch.

  From the grass, he begins to calculate. It’s a terrible calculation, the worst possible: the truck’s angle, its velocity, the people in front of it, the direction they’re facing, who sees, who doesn’t see. Where his daughter is now.

  Red pill meets no-red-pill, and what happens?

  This. This is the thing that happens.

  * * *

  —

  The ones who are lonely. The ones who feel like a joke. The ones who assuage their loneliness by making jokes. The ones who like how the joking feels. The ones who find community in these jokes, then find themselves nudged, one click at a time, deeper and deeper into something that is no joke.

  The ones who think that perhaps they’ve found it, at last, the explanation that makes all mismatched puzzle pieces of a life click together.

  The problem is obvious. The problem is Them.

  The ones who are no longer joking, who begin to see the world as a sinister, zero-sum game. The ones who are determined: if this is a game, it’s one they won’t lose, can’t lose, refuse to lose. No matter what it takes.

  The ones who will do anything.

  * * *

  —

  Later, when this moment has morphed into the past, when the whole world has heard of Starkfield, Massachusetts, Ethan will look in the mirror. He’ll see what Jarrett himself must have seen in those final moments of the Before: the man with the shaved head and long beard, the trace of “RED PILL” still on his pale skin. Only then will he understand: Jarrett saw himself in Ethan. And while Ethan saw a part of himself in Jarrett, these things, bewilderingly, were not the same.

  The nod the two shared was no friendly greeting, no benign acknowledgment of the world’s weirdness. Jarrett was having a different conversation entirely, just as he had been all along.

  Punching bags for the whole world.

  Kissing American soil faster than you can say make me a sandwich.

  People coming in just to make trouble.

  Refuse to accept the decline of our own lives.

  Ethan will learn, too, surreally, that Jarrett K wasn’t even the kid’s name. He’d been wearing another employee’s shirt, someone who no longer worked for UPS. These misunderstandings will be enough for Ethan to convince himself at times that maybe none of this was real, that perhaps it never actually happened, That is not what I meant at all.

  But all of that will come later. Because right now, there’s no more sound. No more meaning. There is nothing but that truck, going where no vehicle ever should: into the crowd. And moving on the edge of that crowd is a child in plaid, craning her neck to find her mother.

  Unaware, unself-conscious. Unprepared for the world that is.

  There is nothing but terrible distance between them. Not big enough, and closing fast.

  * * *

  —

  Just before it happens, from his helpless spot near the bottom of the hill, Ethan sees Zo’s face. Or maybe this is something he invents later in his mind. Either way, when he looks back at this, the final instant before he crosses over into some new thing, he will remember Zo’s expression as twisted, monstrous, expressing the full horror of what is happening.

  And that is when Ethan understands:

  No out there, separate from here.

  No they, separate from I.

  No one else, nowhere else.

  What happens in the world happens, too, to him.

  get in, witches

  there will be time, there will be time

  we’re going hunting

  welcome to the

  decisions and revisions a minute

  hyperreality

  will erase

  Wind in the trees, sun through the leaves.

  A cloudless sky, crisp and perfect, and beneath it rises a child. She soars upward, arms extended to her sides. She’s unreasonably high, impossibly high. She looks like she could rise forever.

  Time slows, then ceases altogether.

  She dangles, plaid rippling, red sneakers against blue sky. She is a scrap of linen suspended on an invisible clothesline.

  Alex will never write that report for science day. That’s all over now. Because witches are real, and right here is all the proof Ethan will ever need: his daughter, his miracle child, finder-of-four-leaf-clovers, hider in attic stairwells, belter
of showtunes.

  Alex, doing the impossible, the thing she alone seemed to know was possible.

  Alex: His daughter, a girl in this world, propelled by forces she can’t possibly understand.

  Taken by

  Taken by the sky.

  Alex: a speck in space, moving farther and farther into the deepening blue, all of Starkfield immeasurably below her.

  Alex: Defying, at long last, gravity.

  The photograph, that sunny image of smiling faces, was still in my hand when I heard Ethan’s voice behind me. “What happened?”

  Instantly, reality began piecing itself together again, LEGO bricks slotting into place: the flat tire, the car ride, this torn-apart living room crammed with boxes. The stacks of furniture, the weary man, the me and the him, the Technicolor reality of here and now. I must have started when he spoke, because Ethan apologized, took a step backward. A way of reassuring me, probably.

  How long had I been standing there? When, exactly, had Ethan stopped searching for the car jack? What happened? It was unnerving, frankly, his asking that question. Like the man could read my thoughts.

  Maybe he could read them, actually. He probably could.

  I glanced down at the picture in my hand. “Looks like a happy family,” I said. In the photo, a girl, somewhere between young and old, sits flanked by her mother and father. Both parents’ heads are tilted back, mouths open, their faces captured in a burst of joyful surprise. The girl wears an impish, delighted expression. She appears to have said something funny and unexpected, made her parents laugh, the instant—just one of the seemingly endless string of instants that somehow combine to form a life—made indelible with a single click of the camera.

  What had the girl said? I almost asked; I opened my mouth to form the question, but the words stuck in my throat. I set the picture down, turned around. Behind Ethan, streaks of sun, the last of the day, streamed through the window. Inside, they were absorbed into stacks of furniture, all those open, overflowing boxes. Long shadows stretched across the floor: lumpish beasts slouching their way toward who-knows-where.

  “Anyway,” Ethan said, “I found the car jack.”

  Yes. There it was: on the arm of a gray sofa that was supposed to be blue.

  I didn’t want to see that sofa. I didn’t want to look at Ethan, didn’t want to watch light and shadow duke it out inside this cramped, chaotic space. All I wanted—and I wanted it desperately, hungrily, the way a drowning person must crave air—was to escape. I longed to return to This Is Genius, to disappear into my book, lose myself in big ideas, in human aspiration. I wanted to push this whole mournful scene so far into the periphery that I could forget, just for a bit, that any of it existed.

  Call me heartless. But if you’d seen that room through my eyes—the shadows, those boxes, that earnest, broken man—you’d have needed out too.

  Ethan’s voice was quiet when he spoke again. “She had a good day today.” He offered no more explanation.

  I nodded, walked to the pillow where the old dog lay. The animal lifted her head, thumped her tail. When I bent down, she rolled onto her side, exposing the soft pink of her underbelly.

  Be careful, Hypatia. I’m not to be trusted.

  I pressed my hand against the dog’s chest, felt her heartbeat. I closed my eyes, tried to imagine all it takes to keep a body going: the pumps and proteins, the cell factories deep inside marrow, the electric jump of nerves, the tiny coils of genes, all those rushing currents of blood.

  Ethan moved toward the door.

  So it was done at last, this visit. Now we’d head out into the cold March afternoon, climb back into my car, head down the hill, return to that dented Subaru with the flat tire. Maybe I’d wait with him in the cold—long enough, anyway, to be sure he got the spare on. Then I’d flee.

  But Ethan’s hand rested on the doorknob, didn’t move. “Svetlana,” he said. And when I didn’t answer, didn’t understand, he explained: “The thing that made us laugh. Just before Maddy snapped that picture. Remember?”

  And then I do. I do remember. It wasn’t long before Alex started sixth grade. We’d asked Maddy to take a photo of the three of us, something the Rainbow Seed School could put into their family directory. After several closed-eye attempts, Alex had begun, out of the blue, speaking in a Russian accent. “Vahht?” she’d purred, when I asked what she was doing. “Dees is how Svetlana always speak, you no like?”

  It’s like a fever breaking, that memory.

  I move toward Ethan. We wrap our arms around each other, his hand on my back, my head against his chest. “Zo,” Ethan whispers to my hair. Then he says the thing we have said again and again, each to the other, and to our child, and to whatever forces govern this world: I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.

  “Shhh.” This time I am the one who comforts. Next time it will go differently. Because solace, too, moves back and forth, like waves between shores: his then mine then back again, world without end. “She’s okay,” I remind my husband. “She was lucky. We’re so lucky, remember? Alex is going to be okay.”

  * * *

  —

  The smell of Steris, the smell of lilies, the smell of bacteria festering beneath hard cast, of unwashed hair, of hospital meals ordered and left uneaten on plastic trays until some girl in red scrubs clears them away. Bouquets and Mylar balloons and oversized stuffed bunnies, too many gifts, so many that the nurses must carry them elsewhere, to other rooms, to strangers, the lonely and the lost, the ones who don’t get visitors, the ones whose faces aren’t plastered across televisions on six continents, who haven’t seen their still-short lives turned into a national tragedy, or—depending on who you are and what websites you visit—a meme.

  Tubes in the nose, tubes in the arms, tubes in the bladder, the throat, the lungs. Mysterious fluids drip-dripping, don’t ask too many questions about what’s in those IV bags or why they’re needed, no one’s got time for good answers, and anyway, you probably don’t want to know. The endless beeping: machines that measure oxygen, temperature, heart rate, pressure on the brain, respiration—touch and go, that, but the kid’s still respiring, thank God.

  Thank God.

  Nurses spread balm on cracked lips. Some days, those lips fade to ghostly gray. Again and again: the surgical waiting room. Never alone in there (what, you think you’re special?). Some families weep, huddle, hold hands, pray. Others stare at the television with dull eyes. In the hallway just outside the door, the chaplain hovers. He doesn’t enter, but he never strays far.

  No. Like your shadow, like your nightmares, like the grim reaper himself, the man’s never far off.

  * * *

  —

  There was a moment, eleven and a half years ago. Just after Alex was born.

  Those early days of motherhood were hard for me—harder than I ever expected, or confessed. Maybe the problem was chemical—a precipitous drop of hormones after a long and harrowing birth. Maybe it was exhaustion, my desperate lack of sleep combined with the strange, driftless tedium of new motherhood—all those shapeless days of cluster feedings and diaper changes, up-the-back poops and stained onesies. Or perhaps it was that I’d become, overnight, an it, not so much a person as an object that existed solely to meet another’s needs.

  Make no mistake: I adored this child, loved her wholly, unconditionally, boundlessly. But love, it turns out, can be complicated. Sometimes it takes the form of a stone on a chest: the bigger it is, the more difficult it becomes to breathe.

  I think it was a month after Alex’s birth, maybe two. One of the bad days. I’d announced (my voice strong, I was almost sure) that perhaps I’d go out for a walk. Would Ethan mind so much holding the baby for a while?

  It was late summer then, late afternoon. The world outside was green, lush, unnervingly alive. The air smelled ripe and grassy. I looked up as I walked, saw
hundreds of thousands of leaves, palms up, drinking the sun. I glanced at my hands, noticed with a strange sort of detachment that they seemed to be shaking. I moved them in and out of the dappled light, watched my flesh turn pink, then gray, then back again, and when I finally returned home, I found Ethan sitting on the sofa beaming at Alex.

  It was a nothing moment, a plain, ordinary thing: a father gazing at his infant daughter, light in his eyes.

  “How is she?” I asked. He answered with one word: perfect.

  He meant it too. Alex was perfect in his eyes. Everything was perfect, nothing more was needed, and in that moment—almost shocking in its simplicity—I was able to glimpse the world as my husband saw it.

  His was a world uncomplicated. He had no reason to believe that this baby, this little girl in his arms, needed anything more than What Is. Ethan was, as humans go, relatively whole: unscathed, unbroken, unashamed, undiminished.

  For him, love wasn’t merely sufficient. It was everything, the only thing.

  I sat down next to them. I kissed my daughter on her tiny forehead, let my lips linger on her skin. She smelled of lavender, of Desitin, of baby powder, of herself.

  Yes, I thought: Yes. It can be this simple sometimes.

  It’s a fact: Ethan has always been my better half.

  * * *

  —

  In the hospital where Alex lay after the smash-up—Schrödinger’s child held in the balance by medicine and machinery—the sheets smelled like glue. The odor, formaldehyde maybe, was so thick I could taste it when I got too close. The windows didn’t open, but perhaps that was just as well: on the other side of the glass I could see the news vans, the endless, awful news vans that filled the parking lot.

  Sometimes the president of the hospital made statements to the assembled press corps. He fumbled his words, was skewered online. He wasn’t made for this.