The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  The door to 405 was open, the television blaring. The room was sterile in the way of doctors’ offices, the color scheme nothing that would have been chosen for a home—blue and fuchsia with white-flowered wallpaper. A food tray was swiveled over the bed, plastic dishes and a carton of milk, the same sort kindergartners would drink from. Potted hyacinths were on the nightstand, filling the room with sweetness that masked the earthier smells of my mother’s body.

  “I think my dosage is off,” she said. “I’ve been drowsy—”

  I flinched at the concavities of her face when she turned toward me. The shape of my mother’s head was different, tucked in; a significant part of her jaw had been removed. She looked mummylike, bandage-wrapped bedsores on her forearms and bedsheets over her legs.

  “Mom,” I said.

  “Oh?” she said. “Oh, I thought you were the nurse. Shannon?”

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  “It can’t be. I don’t believe you.”

  Mom propped herself up on her elbows, her gown falling away to reveal the skin of her shoulders, even more supple with age, softer, it seemed, and coated with white down. Her hair was mussed—it looked greasy, like it hadn’t been washed in several days.

  “You haven’t changed a day,” she said. “Look at you, Shannon. Where have you been? You left me. You left me bereft. You left me alone.”

  “I was deployed,” I said, a lie made no less vile because it was in some sense true. “I had to go.”

  “I’m . . . look at me,” she said, tugging her gown back over her shoulders. “I’m so embarrassed. You shouldn’t see me like this. You shouldn’t see your own mother like this. You should have told them you were coming, I could have dressed.”

  Her expressions were altered because of her surgeries, scars like white worms wriggled on her jowls and throat when she talked. I said, “Mom, it’s all right, I like seeing you.”

  “New nurses come in here every day, and they don’t take care of me. Sweetie? Sweetie, are you out there? Come here, Sweetie—”

  “I’m here,” I said, but when I took a step closer to the bed, Mother said, “Not you.”

  A woman appeared in the doorway, a hoary woman in a wheelchair, her hair a tangle of steel wool. Sweetie pulled herself along with her white sneakers and her hands on the wheels, tucked herself inside the room and stared at me.

  “This is the one I told you about, Sweetie,” said Mom. “The daughter.”

  “I’m Shannon,” I said, realizing I’d been damned during my years of absence. “A pleasure to meet you.”

  Sweetie laughed, a horrible wheezing.

  “Sweetie’s my friend, my only friend,” said Mother. “We call this place our ghost house, because we feel like ghosts here.”

  “Sure enough,” said Sweetie.

  I pulled a chair over to my mother’s bedside, took one of her hands. She was insubstantial, just bones and veins and a wrapping paper of skin.

  “What happened?” I asked. “You’ve been sick.”

  “I’m told I’m a tough old bird, Shannon,” she said. “Too gamy for death to eat.”

  Cancer in her intestines and in her mouth, she explained. The doctors broke her jaw and removed the cancerous half. They cut apart her throat. Cut open her intestines and clipped out the effected lengths, leaving her with a colostomy bag.

  “All I ate was Ensure,” she said. “Seemed like years. I had a feeding tube right in my stomach for such a long time, right here,” she said, pointing just above her belly button. “I turned skinny.”

  “You were always skinny,” I said.

  “It’s hard for me to chew, even still—I can’t eat very much. I don’t think these nurses know what they’re doing.”

  She’d barely nibbled the cut of turkey and mashed potatoes on her dinner tray.

  “Nineteen years,” she said. “You disappeared in 1997. You never came back, you never said good-bye. What do you think about that, Sweetie? Your boy’s no good, I’ve met him—always trying to take your money, but at least he comes to see you. My daughter left me.”

  “No good,” Sweetie said.

  “They experimented on me,” said Mom. “After they butchered me like this, some doctor paid me a visit, this salesman—said I was terminal but an ideal candidate, and they wanted to know if I’d accept a thousand dollars to be part of their trials. I was one of the first in the entire country. Three injections, that’s all. Tiny robots swimming in my blood, finding cancer cells and killing them. After all these years, all this suffering—three injections. You can tell your children someday how their grandmother was part of the first trials.”

  A cure for cancer. “That’s . . . miraculous,” I said. I’d heard rumors of far-future IFTs where diseases had been solved, but a cure for cancer by 2015? “They cured you?”

  “A guinea pig,” she said. “I got lucky—could never afford it otherwise. Can I tell you about a dream I had? A dream about you. After you’d disappeared and I gave up hoping you’d ever come back, I dreamed I was walking down a street, one of those streets in Europe—old buildings, old apartments. I heard a cracking sound—and saw the wall of the building had cracked. I heard snapping wood—the floorboards. The apartment was on fire, and I saw flames rush from the windows, bright orange flames that reached into the sky. You were just a child, playing on the sidewalk, my sweet child. I ran to you, I scooped you up—just before the house collapsed. I saved you, Shannon, but when I looked to see you in my arms, you’d disappeared.”

  “Only a dream,” I said.

  “A horrible thing, to dream,” she said.

  We sat with Sweetie for over an hour, most of the time passing in silence, the three of us staring passively at the television—a singing contest, with judges spinning in futuristic thrones. A nurse changed my mother’s colostomy bag—a flush of embarrassment on my mother’s behalf, a woman given up to this male nurse who handled her body like it was nothing, nothing more than a trash can that needed emptying.

  “You left me. Just like he did,” she said, knowing where to bury the knife.

  “I was deployed,” I said again, the lie hollow this second time.

  “Deployed, always deployed—you lost your leg, you aged, you aged horrifically, always so old, too old, always getting so old I thought you and I were the same age, but now you’re here and you haven’t aged in twenty years. It’s a sickness—”

  “I was at sea.”

  “Nineteen years without a word, you and your father.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Do you even remember your father?” she asked. “He left when you were young, but I bet you remember something.”

  Nothing but images—shattered stained glass I hoped could be re-formed into the image of a saint.

  “I remember the photograph we had of him on the mantel,” I said. “That’s mostly how I remember him.”

  “That’s how I wanted you to remember your father when you were younger. I wanted you to have good memories.”

  “I remember him lifting me into the air,” I said.

  “I used to wonder if you could smell that other woman on him,” said my mother.

  “Please don’t—”

  “You’re not that delicate, are you? You come back after all these years and you expect me not to compare you to him? We’re all adults here. Or is it that you want to be faithful to him?” she said. “He’s not worth it. I could smell her on him when he came home too late for dinner, and then he’d hug you and I’d wonder if you could smell her. Isn’t that awful, a woman wondering if her baby girl knew what the smell of another woman was?”

  Father smelled like pipe smoke. His breath sometimes like wintergreen.

  “We don’t need to talk about this,” I said.

  Very few memories of my father. Flannel shirts and blue jeans—or maybe just one memory spread out over years. Pipe smoke, wintergreen. Scruffy—I remembered him with a beard, or stubble, even though the image of him that I remember most clearly was the
picture on the mantel, a young sailor, clean-cut.

  “I remember his flannel shirts,” I said.

  “I don’t believe in you,” said my mother. “I think you’re a dream, or a nightmare I’m having. Am I dreaming, Sweetie?”

  “I hope we’re dreaming, you and me,” said her friend.

  “You can’t just disappear for nineteen years,” said Mother. “You and your father.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, stepping away, refusing to cry in front of her. The hallway air was stale with medicinal smells and disinfectant. Somewhere, in some other room, a woman screamed, and it sounded like she was burning alive. I had to remind myself that this world was false, that her accusations against me were false; it was my father who’d abandoned us. I felt guilty for something I hadn’t done—I never abandoned her, would be with her again when I returned from this IFT as if no time had gone by. No time for her at least. When I thought of the picture of my father on our mantel, I always gave him the benefit of the doubt, always on some level blaming my mother for his leaving us—unfair of me, but I’d think of my mother at the call center, a failure at her grander dreams, a drunk, the hours at McGrogran’s siphoning off her life, and I’d think, No wonder the man left us. I resented her for losing him. She gave him away. She gave away everything and kept nothing.

  Sweetie and my mother had returned their attention to the television, a vacant smile twisting my mother’s face as she hummed along with one of the contestants on the show.

  “Mom?”

  “Too late, too late,” she said. My mother settled into her pillow, closed her eyes. I kissed her forehead—her skin clammy, sweat-scented. I began to cry harder, this IFT dredging up too much pain. Only a version of the truth, I told myself, IFTs warping around the mind of the observer, a black hole warping light. I always wondered if I took after my father, sometimes hoping I took after him, imagining his intricate inner life—a marked contrast to Mom, who always looked outward. I felt so alone after Courtney had died, and I wanted her then, wanted my mom, wanted her to show me how to bear such loss, but she was distant. Her circle at McGrogan’s, her late nights, while her daughter drifted unmoored. I used to think that my father had tried to love her but that she was never there for him, that she had eventually pushed him away. I used to daydream of leaving her, too, resentful. But she was the one who stayed for me when he had left us. She had stayed even while everyone in her life abandoned her—while I abandoned her.

  Sweetie’s brown eyes were pools inviting me to drown. “We’ll keep each other,” she said. “When she wakes up, I’ll tell her you were just a haunt, a wayward.”

  I found one of Mom’s nurses at the call station, clicking fingernails against the screen of her phone.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “My mother was treated for cancer—she mentioned an injection therapy? Amanda Moss?”

  The nurse seemed annoyed to have been pulled away from her screen—she slapped a pamphlet down on the counter: Non-Invasive Cancer Therapy. Phasal Systems. I was aware of Phasal, a spin-off company from the Naval Research Lab—in most other IFTs, Phasal had grown into a communications and entertainment behemoth, the makers of Ambient Systems. Phasal was pharmaceutical here—other IFTs might have the miracle of Ambient Systems instead of smartphones, but here there was a cure for cancer. Cell-specific medicine delivery. Smart meds, nanotech injections.

  “She got the cancer cure through government assistance,” said the nurse, “but you have to be rich to live forever.”

  —

  I checked in to a Red Roof Inn that accepted cash. A business center, a room off the lobby equipped with computers, a printer. I logged on with my key card, Google easy enough once the front-desk clerk showed me where to click. Hours researching Marian, scribbling notes on hotel stationery. Philip Nestor + West Virginia hit a Web site called the Eagle’s Nest. World War II memorabilia. The SHOP tab displayed a grid of Nazi artifacts, flags and antique weapons. I bristled at the swastikas, wondering if this was even the same person I had known or if I was tracking the wrong Philip Nestor. Not much information on the Web page, but APPEARANCES listed upcoming shows, the Monroeville Guns and Ammo Show a few weekends away. I could find him there.

  Scant results for Nicole Onyongo, the woman in Mursult’s photographs. I landed on a pdf of a sheriff’s document that indicated a stint in county jail, drug-related—even more reason not to flash a badge and pepper her with questions about a past murder. Njoku’s file mentioned she was habitual at a bar called May’rz Inn. I thought of my mother, how if she wasn’t at home she would be at McGrogan’s. The name of Nicole Onyongo’s bar rang a bell, and I checked the address, knew where the place was, just a ten-minute drive from the Red Roof into downtown Washington, on South Main. Almost midnight, but a good chance it would be open, so I took my key card from the computer and drove over. The May’rz Inn was a dive in a row of mostly abandoned storefronts nestled near the Bradford House, a stone Georgian from the 1700s, a Whiskey Rebellion house. No windows, just an emerald-green front door beneath an awning. SMOKING PERMITTED. WEDNESDAY WINGS. I parked out front on the empty street.

  May’rz was lit with neon, and the television glow above the bar was vague with hanging smoke. A narrow space, the clack of pool balls in a back room, Zeppelin on the jukebox. The place was nearly empty, but she sat at the bar, her cigarette smoldering as she spoke with the bartender. Nicole Onyongo was older than in the photographs I’d seen of her, taller than I would have guessed, but her movements were as sinuous as the trail of smoke that rose from her cigarette. She noticed me watching her—her eyes were startling, the color of teak, but laconic, her expression like she already doubted anything I would ever say.

  “Can I get you anything?” from the bartender.

  “Just looking for someone,” I said, leaving.

  The FBI had interviewed the woman, Nestor had interviewed her. NCIS would have talked with her, too, maybe O’Connor. Even if she’d been emotionally insulated near the time when Mursult was killed, she might talk now. She had been close with Mursult, her memories of the man were valuable to me.

  A dilapidated building stood next door to May’rz, a sign out front—ROOM VACANCY. I jotted down the landlord’s number, called once I was back at the Red Roof. Almost one o’clock in the morning, expecting to leave a message on a machine, but a man’s voice answered, his accent Eastern European, almost too thick to understand.

  “Come by tomorrow,” he said. “Morning. I’ll give you keys then.”

  “Is it okay if I pay with cash?” I asked.

  “Cash only,” he said.

  I handed him the security deposit and first month’s rent the next morning—no lease, month-to-month payments. I moved in that afternoon, the apartment a one-bedroom unit on the third floor, no elevator. Musty. I used a butter knife to chip away paint from the windows before I could slide them open. Worn wood floors, the molding painted with several coats of cream. The kitchen sink had the same faucet I remembered from my grandmother’s house, the cabinets were similar, too—a moment of lensing, I guessed, details existing only because I was the one here to observe them. This apartment might be slightly different in terra firma. I had brought tablets of Red Roof Inn stationery with me, sat at an antique writing desk that had come with the room, sketching—eventually sketching skeletons, crucified.

  Patrick Mursult, I wrote. Elric Fleece. Libra.

  I thought of Remarque, the commander of Libra, of how she had saved the Cancer. O-ring seals, I wrote, wondering if Libra’s O-ring seals had failed . . . but wouldn’t Remarque have known? Wouldn’t she have saved Libra as she had saved Cancer?

  I tore my notes into small pieces and looked again at Remarque’s picture in the Libra crew list. An attractive woman, dashing—even in this photograph she looked like she could outmaneuver the world. What happened to you?

  —

  Several weeks before Nestor would be at the gun show in Monroeville, where I would ask him what he remembered about Patrick Mursult
and Marian’s death and discovery, how it had all played out. I had time on my hands. I wandered downtown Washington most mornings, picking up the texture of this place, and spent some time at the mall, where I bought clothes to match the styles of other women I saw, comfy clothes, a Mountaineers sweatshirt, athletic-fit tank tops, yoga pants. L’Oréal rinse-out dye to match my driver’s license, a luxurious brunette color that brought out my sharper features, my cheekbones, my jawline—I felt tougher, more pugnacious than as a blonde.

  May’rz most nights, becoming a regular, and Nicole there most nights, too. She came there to smoke and drink and watch TV, the two of us sitting just a few seats from each other, passing the time in silence until a week or so had passed, rounding toward midnight on a Thursday, after we’d both built up a pretty good buzz. An early snowstorm had kicked up, people coming into May’rz stamping their shoes and shaking snow from their collars. I’d learned she drank manhattans, so I bought her a drink.

  “I’m Courtney, by the way,” I told her, thickening the Guntown drawl that had always played at the edge of my voice anyway. “About time I introduced myself.”

  “Cole,” she’d said, her African accent lilting, melodic. We shook hands, her palms rough, almost callused, it felt like. She wore a bracelet in the shape of a serpent. Nicole slid a seat closer to mine, lit one of her Parliaments. “You live around here?”

  “Right next door,” I said. “In that shithole, the white building. I got an apartment there a few days ago, so I drink here and just stumble upstairs when they kick me out.”

  “At first I thought maybe you were with the gas companies when you started showing up,” said Nicole. “But then I thought I recognized you. Have we met before?”

  “I don’t think so. You go to high school around here? I was at Can-Mac.”

  “I grew up in Kenya,” she said. “What do you drink?”