by Chris Vola
Billy fires a few rounds back into the smoke. Looks at his BlackBerry.
“Eighty seconds,” he shouts.
To our right, maybe 50 yards down the big hallway, smoke’s not as heavy, there’s an open door, warm neon light pouring out. A slender shadow waving. Franco.
Billy breaks into a sprint.
I take four or five steps, slip on a puddle, tumble to the concrete, wrenching my ankle. Alaska squeals, lets go. Slammed-face black-out, and when I come to there’s Titus. Eyeballs dangling from candy cane threads, empty pupils, the remains of lips perma-frozen into a gasping howl. Messy zebra skin and a few blood-dipped vertebrae. Davis didn’t blow it apart, he blew it clean off.
Fragments of fingers and white tee shirts are scattered like parade confetti. Something like a moist deflated beach ball squishes under me as I try to stand.
“Forty…nds!” Billy shouts from the entrance to the lab, barely audible. “…G..up!”
I find Alaska, face down and fetal, swing her over my shoulder, ignore the crunching bone friction in my boot, run.
A scream from behind. “X! …rand!” I don’t hear the bullets as they’re fired from somewhere near the blown-out doorway, and I don’t feel the three that pass through, kneecap shatter-box. I step forward but the legs snap, veiny Popsicles, collapse over themselves. Alaska tumbles again, hurt, blood pouring from a fizzy green gash above her elbow.
I remember Billy’s face, dragging me, pulling Alaska with his other hand. I remember Franco’s faux-hawk in the doorway, the computer lab kids standing next to him, yawning, iPod buds in, bobbing their heads to invisible beats, the redhead typing a text message.
We’re not going to make it.
“Take her! Take her!” try to push Billy away. A light flashes on the BlackBerry attached to his hip. I don’t hear the explosion, but I feel the ground buckle, enough to shake Billy free. Stumbles backwards into the lab, holds on to Alaska. Franco, grinning, pulls them inside.
The rumble grows, voiceless. Franco runs out carrying what looks like a silver tarp, and as the hallway ignites in a gush of electric heat, he throws it over me, and the door to the lab screams shut as the blare of yellow sweeps over, and the only thing I see is Titus’ severed hog head, his skewered mouth opening into a huge void, a vortex, and this isn’t the way it’s supposed to happen, this can’t be true, this isn’t the way it happens…
And I remember, this is what it must be like when you die.
17
Vola
I SORT OF wake up and they’re all saying stuff like Josh, how are you feeling or you really had us scared for a while there, man, some Wizard of Oz shit. Almost everybody’s here – Billy, Archer Hamilton, my mother, my father, Davis.
When Archer asks me if I can remember how it felt, my mother squeezes his shoulder hard. He winces and shuts up. Everyone else is smiling at me like the girl who sleeps at your apartment but won’t tell you she’s been fucking one of your friends for the past week.
The scene is starting to sink in. But it’s not the cold potatoes and spinach on the plastic tray and the nurse who wipes my ass twice a day. I can literally feel it inside of me, sucking me deeper into the bed until I can barely see over the metal railing at the far end. It’s all right; I like being numb.
Lauren visits me at night. I don’t know how she gets by the security guards and the doctors, but she does. She gets in on the right side of the bed because she likes to lie on her left side. That way, if I fall asleep and start to snore, she can tickle my stomach until I wake up. Then she kisses my cheek. I smile when I see she’s wearing my Widespread Panic tie-dye like she used to do in college. It’s so big on her that she doesn’t have to put on any shorts.
I ask her why she doesn’t visit at normal times like everyone else. She laughs, nuzzles her face against my neck. She never answers my questions. Instead, we talk about a few years ago, when we first met. She keeps reminding me about this one time the summer before my senior year of college. We were at a party at Jackson Smith’s, and we ended up sitting together by the water after everybody else fell asleep or passed out.
We hurried through the gate, down the wooden path, past the pool house, past the lighthouse, onto the beach. We stopped when we got about three feet from the water. It was low tide and the air reeked of salt and shit. We laid back and looked out across the Sound.
Besides the smell, the beach was beautiful. A string of piled rocks formed a black line that looked like it stretched out for miles. Boulders poked their heads out of the water a few yards away. For a second I wanted to swim out to one of them. The rippling of each wave made a silver streak that lasted for a second under the moonlight. Even though there was a full moon, the stars were bright, slicing through the suburban-friendly orange glow. Lauren tugged on my arm.
“Do you believe in God?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Why?”
“Whenever I sit on the beach at night and all I can see are the stars and the water,” she said, “I feel like I’m inside a huge dome, like I’m in one of those little snow globes that you shake and all the plastic snow falls on the town. The stars are the snowflakes, except they don’t move. I start to wonder what’s behind those stars. I can almost see a giant hand holding the globe, and a pair of eyes looking down, trying to figure out what’s going on inside.”
“Scary,” I said. “What if it wanted to shake the globe?”
“True,” she said, “but when I look at the stars, I feel the opposite. It’s almost like the hand is keeping us steady, just looking at what it’s holding and wishing everything could stay just like it is now.” While she talked, she slipped her hand into mine. Her fingers were so small but they locked in perfectly. Her skin was hot and sandy. I felt her pulse. We looked up at the sky for a while, not saying anything.
Her eyes reflected the moonlight hitting the waves. I felt like I was swimming in them. But I didn't have time to enjoy it because she started kissing my lips and neck, running her hands through my hair. Her mouth tasted like cigarettes and vodka. I looked up at the stars again for a second and breathed in the salty air that suddenly smelled incredible.
EVERYONE SITS WHEN they visit. They might be talking, asking me questions, telling me to speak clearly into the digital voice recorder, or just staring, but they never do it standing up. I wonder if they think it affects me. Besides the men in blue coats, not many people come.
Sometimes I tell my mother about my conversations with Lauren and she doesn’t believe me. She says that Lauren’s at work, that she’s four hundred miles away in Manhattan, how could she be here, but I think my mother’s full of shit.
17
Vola
2010
“WE ARE NOW beginning our descent,” the pilot barks through the intercom. “Estimated time of arrival at New London is twenty-three-hundred hours.”
The jet’s elevation dips noticeably. Below cloud-level, the Jersey coastline appears as a string of city and highway lights, gaining in density and brightness until they melt into an electric flash forest over New York. Then the sharp dip eastward onto Long Island, sparser but still defined.
I remember an interview I saw on Discovery Channel where one of the old-time astronauts – Armstrong, or maybe Aldrin – said that when he looked out of the cockpit for the first time and saw the Earth – the whole Earth – disappearing behind him, he had what he described as religious ecstasy. Something about understanding for the first time how interconnected everything was, how we’re all one big, blue, pulsing ball of the same energy, the same life.
I stare down at the honeycomb clusters of orange and neon, a familiar anxiety builds and settles at the bottom of my stomach. I try to focus on the black expanse of the Atlantic, imagine myself somewhere in the middle, bobbing along, below the surface, weightless, the top of my skull never puncturing the womb-warm brine…
Alaska – in the window seat of the wheelchair aisle – lifts her head off my arm, below where the I.V. needle pokes out of
the largest vein, and yawns. She stretches her stick-figure arms and I pull her tee shirt back down over her tummy.
She presses her face to the window, fogs the glass. “Daddy,” she asks, “is that where we live? In the bright lights?”
It’s her first plane trip and she understands the concept perfectly. It’s amazing when I think about how she can even begin to resemble a normal child.
“No,” I say, “but we’re almost home. We live near the same lights, they aren’t as big, though.”
I tickle the back of her neck. She giggles, slaps my hand away. She leans over, rests her smiling head against my shoulder. I run my fingers through her wispy hair.
“And Mommy won’t be there, right?” she asks.
“No,” I say, “she can’t, but if we’re lucky enough, she’ll be coming to meet us soon.”
“Soon.”
“If we’re lucky.”
“Daddy, what’s lucky?”
“What I am, and what you are, right now.”
I press my finger to her nose. She bites it.
BESIDES THE MUFFLED thuds and giggles from Alaska as she investigates the upstairs bedroom, the cottage is the same, maybe cleaner. How can I trust what little dust is left on the surface when so much of it’s already sifted away?
The living room carpet smells vaguely of dryer sheets. All the pictures in the bookshelf are upright, and dusted, along with the table, mantel, and flatscreen.
I don’t see the remote anywhere.
I navigate the chair down the narrow hallway toward the kitchen, expecting to cringe from a whiff of something prehistoric that’s been putrefying in there, but when I wheel around the corner, there’s just more dryer sheets, a pile of clean dishes, the scrubbed faucet. Upstairs, Alaska’s stopped moving. A familiar silence settles in. My house – cluttered by a collection of nothings.
The man in the blue coat at the hospital told me it would look like this. Don’t remember the exact word he used – hibernation? renovation? – to describe what had happened here, but that still doesn’t explain who’s been paying taxes and mowing the lawn. The man in the blue coat… He’d been the first to mention Lauren, about what she’d been told had happened to me, a story that made me laugh because of how bullshit it was, but a story that started to make sense the more he told it to me, the more he made me memorize it. For her sake, he said. Now all I remember are fragments, plot points on an outrageous outline.
Something about a faked boat crash, about the search for our bodies, how they gave up, an empty church at the funeral. How three weeks later, when FBI agents busted into a roach hotel basement in North Fairport on a tip, there were our barely twitching bodies, Billy and me, shot up with an entire pharmacy. Something about a kidnapping, about an organ-harvesting ring that Davis was running, about how he got out before the FBI broke in, how he’s still free, out of the country by now, possibly in Fiji. We were probably going to die anyway, so the agents made the decision to not alert the Fairport police because they wanted to bring us to the Facility. Somewhere in the Midwest with an M, Michigan or maybe Montana. Where they brought us in for the experimental treatment. We’d already been buried once, so there wasn’t any need to get our friends and families riled while we were still alive enough to be medically useful.
The months in comas, half-forgotten jack-o-lantern eyes pumping under the chemical veil.
They woke us up in a frigid room with men in black plastic suits and masks that seemed like entering a brighter, if not less confusing level of the same sad dreamscape.
The drugs were strong.
But the dreams had to end, and when they did, Billy and I were still alive, biologically. There were the months of IV drips, of learning to eat, how to talk, more pills. The doctors were whispering, how many soldiers would be saved because of our recovery, the battlefield procedures they’d now be able to perfect.
We were the proof of their genius, or something close to it.
We started to resemble ourselves. Our bodies didn’t. More time meant slight movement and clarity, exercises under a white-hot gym light. Pain and numbness playing against each other on constant repeat. Even though he’d been fatter than me, Billy made it through the therapy in better shape. There hadn’t been brain damage, but my legs had started to atrophy before they’d found us in the basement. There was a nasty case of sepsis, a concentrated infection where Davis’s hood-rat associates had smashed my kneecaps in with metal bats. Or maybe it was a side effect of the treatment. Then the rehab was done, they had their miracle cures, and Billy and I could crawl out, saved and reclaimed.
That, in greater detail, was what the man in the blue coat told me every day – made me say it back to him until I had it memorized. But the mis-jargoned details don’t change anything. They don’t make the story any less preposterous, any less the product of a Lost episode. But the man said that the story was what would be told, that it would be accepted because there we’re no other options. But she’s married, I said, it won’t matter. She’s at least going to want to see, the man replied. But what about Alaska?. Explain how that works. Easy. When you were in the coma, your DNA was run through the Homeland Security database. Happens that they found a match with a little girl in Virginia whose drug-addled mother had recently died in a meth lab explosion. Make sense?
The man in the blue coat gave me a computer printout:
NORTHEASTERN GENETICS, INC. FORENSICS/DNA/PATERNITY TESTING Certificate of Analysis:
Case Number 194021334
October 24, 2010
Joshua Xavier Bennington
85 Middletown Road
East Fairport, CT 07095 United States
Child: Alaska Doe, Caucasian.
Specimens:
Buccal swab from Alaska Doe Collected by NGI.
Buccal swab from Joshua X. Bennington Collected by NGI.
Results: Joshua Xavier Bennington is the biological father of Alaska Doe (99.999967%). Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) isolated from the above specimens was characterized through polymerase chain reaction (PCR) at the following genetic systems…
In the context of the story, yes.
The more the man told me that story, the more Billy brought Alaska into the hospital room and told me the same story, the more it sank in. I didn’t believe it, but the truth that had been created became convenient, the most reasonable way to jam a few slightly misshapen fringe pieces onto a massive puzzle board that never made sense to begin with. I followed the man in the blue coat because he seemed, looking down at me in the hospital bed, to represent a much larger and more satisfying mantra:
To be told is far better than to remember.
And Lauren did call, two days before I was scheduled to be discharged. I almost didn’t pick up because I was tired, drowsy from the IV drip, and I thought it would just be Billy, holed up in the extended-stay hotel on M or F Street with Alaska, calling to annoy me with stories about how I owed him for the bed-pissings, the clean-ups, the bedtime stories he had to make up on the spot.” Or maybe one last effort to get me out of my baby-blue scrubs and my off-white linoleum box to wheel my pale ass into the sunshine of Our Nation’s plan-made capitol. Here boy! Time for the afternoon walk! The doctors had given me the clearance to enjoy human-like distractions for the next couple days while the digital paperwork was sorted out. I told Billy and the doctors, No. The womb-ripping would have been premature. The hospital room, with its baby-slop gruel was at least tangible, an anchor between a flint-lit future and more than a few hollowed-out specters. I needed something from one side or the other – besides Billy – to pull me up.
I picked up the off-white hospital phone.
“Hello?”
“Say it again.”
“Huh.”
Tight power-breaths.
“Listen,” I said, “I don’t care who this is, but if Billy told you to –”
“Say it again.”
“Lauren?”
The sound of her vacuum in reverse, the too-loud, tell-t
ale tear jerks, the suck of snot. “You fucking asshole. It really is.” More tears, then simply, “Fuck.”
On the other side of the line I grinned at the rawness. The same anger that made me want her to be next to me, warming the room.
They’d contacted her at work in Manhattan that morning, told her an abbreviated version of the memorized story. I tried to fill in more of the details, but she didn’t care. It was obvious she’d already worked most of the way through her emotional implosion.
She needed my voice, and later, my face.
“They’re flying you back in two days,” she said in a librarian’s voice, hushed but definite. “That will give me more than enough time to finish up my end of the proposal we’re working on with Citigroup. Then I’m taking the next week off, and probably the one after that. They can fire me. Like I give a shit. Babe, I’m coming to see you, like ASAP.”
This wasn’t the weathered-down sarcastic defense-speak, the emotionless withdrawal of a replacement mother who worked too long for nothing.
This was the girl I met dancing at a frat party five years ago, the naively passionate Barnard junior who baked oddly themed cookies for the Students Against Imperialism club. The girl who I made out with on the steps of Columbia’s Low Library in the middle of a midnight blizzard, who held on and forced me to keep going even after our throats cracked because she couldn’t get enough of the snowflakes melting against our intertwined faces and evaporating into smoke in the pale, city-lit aurora.
And nothing about John. Had he become a different story? A temporary loss of reason that we’d be laughing about over cocktails with the grandkids? Or had Lauren used up all the magic on the phone as a way to soften the really awful truth she’d be dropping on me face-to-face at the cottage. That she’s with the lust of her life, tucked away in some forbidden condo-zone of Manhattan, stuck on the never-ending thrill ride that is life as an accountant’s boo.