—
Neva was back on a highway now, a smaller one, as she followed the green line deeper into the state. When she approached the point at which the map met her actual location an eerie familiarity announced itself in her sternum, a malignant fear. Not the thrumming of anxiety or the gaping canyon of panic but a radiating, internal bleeding. It reached her shoulders, ran down her arms, circulated through her system as she recognized fast-food restaurants and generic names of plazas, big box stores and local businesses. The geometry of this intersection blinded her for an instant. It went white, like a flash, as if she were recalling a mental picture she had taken.
—
This could be any place, she said to herself. Everywhere looks like this. The sign of the multiplex, the font of the hardware store. The pun in the name of the sandwich shop. The pizza parlor with its oily yellow gloom. It was all so unmemorable that no one would have remembered it unless it was truly a memory. But she had to admit: she had never been here. She had never seen this particular strip mall through the windows of a van. But she had seen places similar, too similar. She was close. She could feel it. She figured they might have tossed the phone out a window or into a garbage can around here, on their way someplace in the area. She knew, unfortunately, how people like this behaved. She kept going past the flashing point on the screen and drove farther. She pulled into several anonymous plazas and pulled out. She kept going. She kept going.
—
She pulled off the highway into yet another parking lot. She stepped out of the car and stood against it while she looked around. A hot summer wind brushed her dark, wavy, slightly spiky shoulder-length hair and her simple black clothes, but her angular purity remained untouched by the air. Her memories attacked, tumultuous, swarming, but her body gathered strength, finding its power. Her mind scanning, eyes narrowed, heart flooded with feelings. Then she saw it. It was a nail salon. In the window was a sign. It didn’t say STRESS REDUCTION like the one she remembered from her past. Instead it said: STIMULUS PLAN.
—
She walked to the gas station on the far side of the movie theater. She made a brief transaction and then walked back to the salon. She was carrying a can in one hand and had slipped something into her pocket. Her eyes squinted into the shapes of tiny beautiful green fish arcing slightly in the sun. She strode into the salon and what happened next was a bolt of mythic lightning, a series of fierce shudders that illuminated the day, broke through the darkness covering the ordinary world. An awakening in vivid bursts of light. In the front of the salon sat a woman behind a desk and beyond her little tables and chairs for manicures and along one side of the room a row of huge padded lounge chairs with basins at their feet for pedicures. To the left of the entrance was a wall covered in nail polishes, rows of reds, pinks, nudes, oranges, blues, corals, greens, novelty colors, sparkles, shimmers, glossy topcoats. Neva heard the door close behind her. The woman at the desk raised her head to ask if she had an appointment, but Neva didn’t answer, she kept walking past the three or four women getting manicures. One in a sweater saying she was always chilly even in summer. There was one along the wall in a sundress getting a pedicure, calling out that she was always hot wasn’t that funny. Others skimmed magazines. Faces looked up at her from their work, from their leisure. She brushed past an area for drying toes and fingers on top of which rested stacks of magazines that slid off and tumbled as she past. The woman from the front desk, her pretty black bangs staying stiffly straight, rushed after Neva as she headed to the back of the salon. She knew there would be a maze of treatment rooms. A bathroom. And then a narrow door, like the door to a broom closet, this one the entry to another world. She opened it and continued and the light was dimmer now and she walked down some stairs and then she started to hear screaming from behind her, from the woman with the stiff bangs. Once she started screaming Neva turned around and yelled at her to get everyone out, get everyone upstairs out. Neva kept going and back here was a darker hive of rooms, and noises came from behind closed doors. A door opened and Neva pushed past a man with no clothes, scrawny, his hair lank. There was more screaming now but she could not really hear it, she was flinging open doors and telling people to leave. No one appeared to be in charge but she knew someone would come and that’s when the body rose from a metal stool and came toward her, a woman not with a black cap of hair but with a slicing voice. Neva pushed her into a small room and locked the door from outside and the woman banged and banged on the door and screamed that she had her phone and was calling the police. Neva looked quickly at each girl. She had never looked away from anything but now she looked away as soon as she identified that they were not Poppy. Until there, curled like a cat in a corner of a room, a ragged figure. Drugged. Awaiting use. Neva thanked the universe, which she felt did not deserve gratitude, but she thanked it anyway. She grabbed Poppy and pulled her up off the floor and pushed her out of the room and said, Do not look back. Keep going. Get out. Poppy stumbled and her bruised legs wobbled in a pair of tiny shorts and her arms were akimbo and she continued moving up the stairs. Go! Neva screamed. Poppy turned around. I said go, said Neva, just keep going. There was a stream of them leaving like the stunned and frightened passengers on a wreck. The woman with the stiff hair pushed her way back downstairs. Neva opened the can she had been carrying. She lifted the lid and started pouring gasoline over furniture, onto the walls, into the old stained carpeting. She motioned for the woman from the desk to get the older woman out of the room, to take her away, now or never. A fat man, bulging, not strong but large, grabbed Neva from behind but she elbowed him away and covered him with gas. The woman with the bangs had taken the woman with the slicing voice. They were gone. Neva ran up the stairs and lit a match. The last thing she saw was the face of the man, aghast, dripping, oily, a face detached from a painting of a mythic battle or rape, a shining head, screaming, reddened, running past her up the narrow stairs, fleeing into the salon. She threw the match down the steps and it landed on the dark carpet. The flames skittered and snaked and found one another and erupted in a frenzy, an inhuman, crackling mob.
—
What Poppy remembers as she runs up the stairs: the assault in the black room. Worse than she had experienced it at the time. At the time, the brain detached, protected, dissociated. As she runs up the stairs and her legs hurt she feels the deep bite of a mouth on her thigh. She feels the stiff grip of a hand around her neck. She feels the burn of the pills. The salty stabbing in her mouth. The metallic taste of liquid down her throat. The knees grip her head. The wild robots lunge and howl. The bite, the grip, the stab. This is what she remembers on the stairs.
—
It’s there, running up the stairs, that she finally knows what has happened to her. She sees that her life has been deranged. She sees that it has always been deranged, but that she had not previously understood how mad, and had never realized how it was not she who had been insane but her circumstances. And now those circumstances, of birth, of environment, of place, of love, had caused a craziness to infiltrate her too. For her the madness of her everyday life had been mundane until recently when it had taken on the quality of death. Of an afterlife existing within this life. The insanity had been hidden for so long by money, by structure, by society, by walls. No one had seemed to notice. The lack of awareness seemed to her at this moment like a wall of steel that had hidden from view the obvious truths. Maybe someone had once told her to run away, but how could she have run away from everything she knew? Everything she loved? There had always been people in her life, all her life, who had been crazier than she, loving her, distracting her, enjoying her because of what they described as her wit, her inspiring intelligence, her superb, indefatigable sense of style. And it had been love, but not the love she had needed.
—
She doesn’t know precisely when the image of despair became burned in her brain but it was at some point on the stairs. It’s the image of her mother, rising, tubes dangling from every orifice,
fighting off the wild robots in the dark room. Death against death. A battle to the end. As she runs up the stairs Poppy is running toward that image. She isn’t afraid. She is running, reaching toward that image. Then it vanishes. Even death disintegrates before her eyes. The vanishing of that image is the image of despair.
—
For her it was when she reached the parking lot, that ugly expanse, cars randomly assembled, the slow reverse of a vehicle backing up and gently turning and driving away, that she had cried. She’d wept without caring if anyone saw her because she was crying tears of release. Not happiness. Not joy. Not yet. Simply tears of release.
—
Around her, the scene of the strip mall, the signs, the letters on the signs, their significant fonts each representing a type of promise, and the cars, one by one pulling away as if by a tide, or standing still, left on the beach, all around her the scene melted into a vision of nature. And as she stood there she turned around and with her mind she let a great gray arcing shield of water rise up, crest, foaming white horses running away, and crash down on the stores, the cars, the parking lot.
—
She would have to do this many times over the course of her life, many thousands of times, before the scene was wiped away.
—
When Poppy stops turning she sees that the wave in her mind is, outside of her mind, a fire. A real fire. Neva shoves her in the car and drives away.
—
The fire burned for thirty hours. No one seemed to know who started it. By the time the firefighters arrived almost everyone had left the scene. It had begun in the basement. They thought they had it under control but then the floor collapsed. The local papers contradicted one another on the exact timing of the fire, but they all agreed that no one was hurt.
36
HE HAD OWED them a lot of money and so he had offered her to them, not directly, not in a way that she could prove, but that’s what he’d done. And they had taken her. Why wouldn’t they? They had dropped her off at the hotel in case she had been needed. When she hadn’t been—needed—they had driven her in the van to the spa and had been waiting for the drugs to take full effect. She had not yet been used. Not in the way they had intended. She had been able to identify them in pictures but they were never found. At least the other girls had gotten away.
—
It’s always the middle of the night. Buried underground and then clawing her way out. Dirt in her mouth, the distinct grit, the taste of wet soil. In the nightmare she is trying to speak but the earth blocks her words. Dry fragments, insects, crawling to the back of her throat. She coughs up a spray of particulate world. She vomits mud.
—
She gets up in her sleep and walks to the window. She pushes away the drapes and puts her palms on the glass. She is standing in a T-shirt and loose pants, facing the city, hands splayed against the night. Felix is watching from the doorway, the low light from the hall outlining his boy frame. What is it? he says. Why are you screaming?
She turns around. She can feel the mud sliding down her chin, her neck, sticking to her nightgown.
Why are you opening the window?
She widens her mouth but cannot speak.
—
It was a long time before she could speak to anybody. Especially to Ian. In dreams he stroked her hair, and then disintegrated into night. She cried for Steve. She cried for everyone.
—
Once in those nights of underground dreams she had left the apartment, walked along the quiet streets, and gone to the park. She lay on the grass like a beggar or a dog and listened to the end-of-summer birds as the sun was rising. They argued and debated like philosophers who had no better place to be. She had no place else to be. She felt the cold ground. She scratched through the vivid-green grass and dug up a black clump. She put it in her mouth. It tasted like the dirt in her dreams, but slightly sweet. She felt the sharp blades of grass pressing against her T-shirt. She kicked off her sneakers and pushed her bare feet against the dewy hill. She rolled back and forth, back and forth, over the wet grass, attempting to press herself back into the earth.
—
When she finally agreed to see Ian he explained. He had decided the night when he had told Alix everything, the night before Steve died, that he would tell her. Tell her all of it, in spite of Steve, in spite of what he’d made Ian sign. Papers did not matter. Only she mattered, he explained. She was his child.
—
She had already had to comprehend so much that this new knowledge was simply another blow that she had to absorb. She took it in. She held it. She was horrified, amazed, unbelieving. He explained that it was the reason he had ended it between them, and had he known what would happen to her as a result he would never have done it that way. He would have told her that first night he had known. He would go back and change everything if he could. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her.
—
The rest of his life. Was that a long time? Or not that long? Time had taken on a new meaning. Time was eternity, perceived in little bits. The rest of their lives was a long time and it was nothing.
—
You’re a survivor, he said to her across the table.
A survivor? She said she didn’t feel that she’d survived.
You have.
Barely.
You will.
Please.
I will do anything.
There isn’t anything for you to do.
There must be something I can do.
Like what? Give me back my youth? My sanity? My self?
The steam from her tea had stopped rising. Her hands wrapped around the cold cup. She tried to look at him for moments at a time but her eyes would drift, or dart, to the side, looking at the spot where the wall met the window, or focusing on the back of someone’s nodding head. She felt a burden, a pressure to explain herself to him. At the same time, she felt it was impossible to explain herself. This only added to her feeling of desperation, of futility.
You say you would do anything for me, will do anything, but there is nothing you can do to protect me. It’s too late. Everything is gone.
Please don’t say that, he said.
Why not?
It isn’t true.
Yes, it is.
You have your whole life ahead of you.
Is that a joke or just a cliché? She looked into the cold tea and then up at him.
It’s neither. I mean it.
You used to be funnier.
They sat in a nearly empty café. She hadn’t wanted to go to his apartment, or have him over.
Maybe I will be again someday. Funny, he said.
You act like things change.
Things do change. People can change. I’ve changed.
So have I, I guess. But I don’t think I can change back, she said.
You can change into something else.
She blew into her teacup, pointlessly. She felt another wave of pressure, a demand to ease his pain. But it was time to discard that kind of unnecessary responsibility. She experimented with telling the truth.
I can’t help you feel better about all of this, she said.
I know.
Her hair had grown longer. She wore a long loose sweater that covered her wrists, almost reached to her fingertips. Her bony fingers curled around the cup. She looked into the orange liquid.
I’m not sure that I can ever see you again.
I hope that isn’t true. But I understand.
The edges of her mouth wrinkled and drew a smile and frown simultaneously. It was a line of pure feeling, not happy or sad but living in the full emotion of the moment. It was form, not style, a form of strength.
She stood up. The scrape of her chair.
Where are you going?
I’m leaving now.
Please don’t, he said. Please don’t leave yet.
I’m leaving. I’m leaving you.
—
As she walked
out the door her eyes squinted, darted, clenched. She caught sight of shadows on glass, the reflection of her coat, letters running backward, a sparkling wave of rhythmic chaos. The mumbled sounds of the restaurant rose in her consciousness and then quieted. Out on the street the reassuring traffic and random pedestrians calmed her nerves.
—
Ian watched her walk away as if she were a hidden piece of his heart that had taken shape outside of him and been hurled back with a violent force. Which of course she was.
—
She was gone and in her place was his love for her. The love of a parent. He let her go.
37
NEVA SAID GOODBYE to the family and traveled for a few months. Felix missed her terribly. He wrote to her, long, richly detailed letters. He insisted on writing by hand, not e-mails, and he spent forever choosing the stationery, addressing the envelopes, picking stamps. It was a healthy distraction from the collapse that was taking place around him. His world broke apart in chunks, a glacier cleaving. Zane Enterprises, with which he had never much concerned himself, became a headline, an accident from which to look away. Whatever pride he had taken in his father’s business had altered into not shame but bewilderment, confusion, and concern. On the hall table there were always stacks of large envelopes from law firms. His mother threw away whole tablefuls of documents in disgust or rage or irresponsibility, he could not tell. Maybe they were not important documents. It was impossible to determine which ones mattered and which did not. He was aware that his father had died leaving a trail, a highway of litigation. He was aware that the company had to let people go, had to move offices. He was aware that things had not ended well. As always, he took a philosophical approach. He knew that in the scheme of things even the collapse of a company, a dynasty, an empire, would be washed away by time. But that did not change the feeling in his chest of a door opening and closing, swinging, unhinged, banging as the wind picked up, and creaking in the night. A mournful movement that was the beating of his heart.
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