The Shimmering State

by Meredith Westgate

  Lucien waits a few beats, expecting to see Dr. Sloane walking toward him now, but when he looks he sees the four figures proceeding toward the staircase at the end of the hall, still holding the girl horizontally. Once they turn, Lucien follows. At the stairway, marked RESTRICTED, he stops. Rests his head against the cool glass. Then he pushes open the door.

  At the bottom of the stairs is a corridor, with two rooms off either side. He follows the voices and peers through the window in the door. A metal table, just like the one he remembers, in the middle of the bright room, the same bright room. Lucien’s breath feels short and acidic. Inside the nurse rubs gauze across the girl’s skin and then places sticky pads along the trail. Two on her forehead, two across her chest, just below her clavicle. More on her arms and on her legs, where the nightgown has been hiked up. Her arms and legs sprawl, motionless, until one of the nurses fixes them.

  The nurse who had been with Dr. Sloane before places an oxygen mask over the girl’s face—her beautiful face that, moments earlier, was snarling, enraged—and strokes back her hair. Suddenly, the girl gasps and tries to rise, then shrieks because she can’t. Dr. Sloane turns from across the room and calls something Lucien can’t hear. Another shot in the girl’s forearm. The same nurse holds her head while her body relaxes.

  Lucien turns away. He considers going back to his room. He shouldn’t be here, but he looks again. Now a small machine is positioned beside the metal table, beside her. There is something plastic in her mouth. Suddenly the girl’s torso thrusts up several inches. Lucien braces for the screaming, the shrill cries, but instead there is only an eerie, heavy silence. Her body rises and falls. One leg, then another. Then her shoulders. The heavy, silent thud of her. Like a horizontal puppet triggered as they watch, unmoved.

  Lucien wants to burst in. His hands are fists. He could pretend to be having an incident himself, an emergency. Anything to interrupt them. Just as he works up the nerve to scream, the door opens into him, and two familiar eyes appear through the glass.

  * * *

  Lucien sits inside the office where only moments earlier he had lurked outside the door. He faces Dr. Sloane at her desk, her dark hair shining almost white beside its lamp. She watches him for longer than feels natural. Then she sighs and shuffles a few papers. The persona from their sessions has been shed for someone entirely human—and exhausted. He should be on edge, more so now than when hiding earlier, but he’s not. He even feels a stability returning to his consciousness. This is what he needed to reconstitute a self, someone else to worry about.

  “I know what you think you saw,” says Dr. Sloane.

  “Do people know you’re doing that here?”

  Lucien feels self-righteous, and it feels good. He is a patient, but he is not powerless.

  “Everything you saw tonight is part of that patient’s treatment and has been agreed upon, by her, in prior discussions,” says Dr. Sloane. “I get it, electroconvulsive therapy has a bad reputation from decades ago when it was administered without proper anesthesia and restraints. And without patient consent. Would you be more comfortable if I showed you her signature?”

  No names, Lucien thinks at this empty offer.

  “What about side effects?”

  “Like what, memory loss? Confusion?” Dr. Sloane tilts her head. “I don’t think you understand her situation. Any memory loss from ECT would be a blessing. That would be progress. We’re shocking her back to life, doing whatever we can to let everything else fall away. We can replace any memories of hers that are affected in the process, that’s the easy part.”

  “I don’t understand, she seems—”

  “Certainly it isn’t lost on you that one might seem one way from the outside. She is struggling, that’s all I’ll say. Don’t trouble yourself, we’re doing everything we can for her.”

  “It just doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Well, very little in life is fair, is it? Grief touches down like a tornado. It ravages one person while sparing others around them. I know it can be hard to reconcile, the seemingly random nature of suffering. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I’ve seen you two. I’ve seen you watching her.”

  He hesitates to explain, or even suggest he might have known her before. What does he know for certain, anyway? He can’t remember. Their meeting must have been mundane if it didn’t show up in his memory for anyone to take notice. So why should he mention it—what if then they could no longer see one another, even in the common spaces? Blocked before he even gets a chance to remember.

  Just then, a chirpy rhythm interrupts the silence of the room. The vibration on the table and the tinny sound of its tune trigger something familiar in Lucien. His hand twitches by his side, hungry for its own.

  “Darling, are you home?” Dr. Sloane whispers into her phone. “I’m sorry, I had to come in. I left you dinner. Oh, all right.”

  Lucien considers a partner on the other end of the line, and Dr. Sloane’s face comes into focus. The softness around her cheeks, and the crinkled skin around her eyes where laughter must have once passed.

  “Sorry,” she says, putting the phone down. “Children.”

  “Yours?”

  “If you can imagine. Everyone here thinks they’re my children. It’s just the one, but she’s a handful. She’s supposed to be at college. God forbid anything go as planned.”

  “Supposed to?”

  “She lost someone, a boyfriend,” she says dismissively, then catches herself. “He took his own life, and apparently her future with it. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be telling you this. It’s entirely inappropriate.” She pauses. “And yet, it’s related, is what it is. You need to take care of yourself. Look out for you, no one else will.”

  Lucien fidgets in his seat. The way she looks at him, the way she sees him.

  “I know you,” she adds. “Don’t forget. I know you’ve been taking care of people—or a person—for a very long time. And now here you are, in the midst of recovery, already setting yourself up to start that again. All for a stranger.”

  Lucien wonders how she could have missed their connection. Or is this part of the game? Is she trying to get him to say it? Does she already know? She has seen everything he has inside of him, if she paid attention. And yet he resents the implication that her access gives her any say. He never asked to be told who he is or how to live his life. His life. His.

  “I understand,” he says, “but you’re right, I don’t even know her. We sit next to each other occasionally in the common area. As does everyone else.”

  “You’re doing very well here, you know,” says Dr. Sloane. “Though the complications from taking a relative’s Memoroxin are considerably less severe, so you have genetics to thank. And good genes, I suppose. Still, you need to stay focused.”

  Lucien thinks of all the things he could focus on, if only he had a book, a notepad, his camera. Staying focused on being yourself feels like asking someone to focus on homeostasis, cellular respiration. To age. Attention only makes it seem impossible.

  “Right, sure,” he says.

  Dr. Sloane picks up her cell phone again, checking for a message that isn’t there.

  “What’s going to happen to her?”

  “She’ll be fine. My daughter is many things, but at least she’s resilient.”

  “That’s good,” he says. “But I meant that girl.”

  “Like I said, you’re lucky. Consciousness is a very fragile construction, and we are not in the business of magic. Rehabilitation takes time, especially when one’s memories have been as tainted as hers. It only takes a moment to corrupt a consciousness, much longer to restore it.”

  “Maybe someone should be with her here, every night.”

  “You don’t think that’s why I was called in? With three other nurses on shift?”

  Lucien shrugs; he senses a defensiveness in her voice.

  “She gets more than enough attention here. What sh
e needs is to find herself again, and no one can do that for her.”

  Chapter 9 TODAY

  Sophie is under a cool cloud.

  Sophie is on a metal table.

  Sophie is drifting.

  Sophie is eighteen, back in Minneapolis.

  Sophie is leaving for Los Angeles tomorrow. For a spot in the corps de ballet at the famed Los Angeles Ballet Company. An ensemble member. Louise is taking her to a performance to celebrate her departure, this new beginning, and their goodbye. Louise is Sophie’s friend and fellow dancer, the only one left from their years of hard work in middle school, then through high school. Louise will be going to Macalester in the fall, to study literature, and Sophie feels like she is jumping off a cliff, alone.

  This performance is by a new dance group holding open studios in Minneapolis’s burgeoning arts district. The large industrial space appears to be shared with a ceramics studio, with cloths draped over amorphous shapes on tables at the other side of the room. This group, Louise explains beforehand, practices something called Gaga, and when the lights come on and there is no music, only the dry-powdered sound of feet on wood, Sophie’s stomach lurches with embarrassment for them. That thump, the drag and slide, the breath needed to propel a body through air, these are usually sounds of shame because your director has cut the music to correct you. Only as the dance continues does Sophie realize this is intentional; there is no music because music hides the struggle. They want to show the physicality. The work of a body.

  Eventually there is music, too. Sophie longs for the silence. Watching them suddenly feels distant, like part of the performance has been taken away, no matter how much the music coaxes her further toward feeling. On a basic level, she misses the knowledge, how hearing the work itself invites the audience inside. Each dancer switches between perfection and seeming chaos. Impeccable posture contrasted immediately with a beastly hunch. What bravery, Sophie thinks, to move with such seeming abandon. What skill, to make the visceral appear beautiful. At one point during the performance, Louise leans her whole body into Sophie, as if to say, See?

  Sophie is lost in every movement.

  Louise wants to join the group. She thinks maybe she could commute from Saint Paul since they’re not a traditional ballet company with such strict rules. Sophie feels like she is being left behind, even though she is the one moving away. They stay after to chat with the dancers, their bodies strange in street clothes just like Sophie’s often feels after performing.

  Sophie is defensive in the car on the way home; she gets angry and says something about the tiny crowd size, then immediately regrets it. Of course, she loved it, too. It’s an outlet, Louise says, nibbling on a protein bar. Maybe it’s not always about restraint. They’re all trained in ballet like us. It’s not the training but what you do with it now that makes you an artist.

  Sophie has been told countless times that ballet is dying, if not already dead. Even an instructor in contemporary dance once said that when all the older people die, there will be no one left to care, let alone buy tickets to the ballet. People don’t just grow into old-fashioned taste. Times have changed, but ballet has not. Sophie told herself it was just the instructor, bitter at teaching dance to high schoolers who will soon outgrow her. But every performance, she scans the crowd and cannot help but notice the mature faces staring back, and behind them the young aspiring ballerinas, awe in their eyes. A system sustaining itself.

  Seeing this performance with Louise feels like confirmation. What if Sophie is committing to something that will no longer exist? What if she is jumping off a cliff, into nothing?

  Louise pauses before getting out of the car in front of her parents’ house. Then she turns to Sophie and says kindly, It takes a lot of restraint to make something look that free.

  Chapter 10 BEFORE

  Sophie stands with her arms extended high, her skin prickling in the cold air of their dance studio currently being taken over for costume fittings. Her hair is still damp at the roots from the morning’s rehearsal. She watches herself in the wall of mirrors while one of the designers pins the costume in place, trying all different cuts and colors.

  Sophie has never been such an integral part of the design, showing up only later for the finished costume to be taken in here, out there. This time, as the sylph, the star, all of the costumes will be designed around hers. Inspired by her portrayal, her movement, her—the culmination of Auguste’s vision.

  She hardly believes what’s unfolding around her in this space that has seen so many days of relentless rehearsal. The same space where she has caught her breath and tapped her muscles to stay focused, to persist. Now nothing could look more right. A fog of baby’s breath is tucked into her bun and behind her ears, hovering like a crown, and vibrant flowers wrap her arms intermittently, on the vine.

  Just earlier today she and Antoine refined their pas de deux, attempting it for the first time in full before Auguste and the rest of the company, over and over, until he was satisfied. If he ever was. Toward the end, Antoine excused himself to vomit in the bathroom, a fact confirmed once he returned. Each time he stood behind her, Sophie felt his hot, putrid breath creeping over her shoulder and tried to shut off her nose. She took shallow breaths through her mouth, though her core ached for more. What no one sees from the stage is the vulgar intimacy that ballet entails; how, pressed in close, you share sweat, you breathe each other’s air, you hear their quickened panting inside of your own. If ballet is to look effortless, it requires a certain distance.

  The designer sisters who agreed to do the costumes are so focused they hardly speak, not only to Sophie but even between one another. They work with an unspoken rhythm and mutual taste. One sister sends their assistants back and forth to the samples, swapping out one pastel fabric for another to play with, while the other experiments with pops of color against the fabrics; a bright red flower tucked against the palest pink; a tangerine ribbon against the faintest mint green.

  In Auguste’s production of La Sylphide, there will be no stitched-on fairy wings for the sylph, but rather a cape that billows as she spins, floating only with her momentum, hovering in the air even as she finally falls. One after another, the colorful fabrics flutter in and out behind the assistants, all for Sophie. The taller sister holds a swatch up against Sophie’s arm, her hair, her lips, and seems to like it, that faintest green. She motions to her assistant, waving her hand, which must translate to something knowable because when he returns he holds two ribbons in different shades of yellow. The taller sister lights up—perfection!—at the marigold velvet.

  In place of a true crown or any jewelry, the other sister slips two golden shoulder pieces, sharp sunbursts, around the thinnest part of Sophie’s biceps.

  “Do you think you can dance in this?” she asks softly.

  “We don’t need her impaling herself, or her partner,” says her sister, laughing. “But it’s heaven. If you can,” she adds, to Sophie.

  The taller sister talks faster, more loosely than her partner. Even the most serious things she says are undercut with humor, while her sister speaks gently and thinks between each word.

  “They suit you,” she says, adjusting the baby’s breath in Sophie’s hair.

  “It’s divine. Reminds me of our Fall 2018 show, in the park. When it poured, ugh, that was such a disaster. But god, those pieces were my favorite ever.”

  Sophie glances back to the mirror, tilting her head to admire herself. She looks more like a religious icon than a fairy, but that’s Auguste; he came to Los Angeles to break with tradition, not perpetuate it. To reimagine the future of ballet. Where better to start than with one of its classics? La Sylphide is traditionally performed with a forest backdrop of ornately painted screens à la Renaissance landscapes; his scene, he had told Sophie multiple times now, would be deconstructed birch trees with no tops, a kind of minimalist dreamscape. All over the floor and suspended from the ceiling, pastel ferns and floral arrangements would hang in the place of leaves of
the forest canopy. It would be whimsical and magical and ethereal. It would be unlike any ballet Sophie had ever seen. Of course, the sisters are no strangers to the avant-garde; they dress Hollywood’s cool girls, always with a retro-inspired, subversive touch of the feminine.

  The shorter sister moves around to face Sophie directly, holding a large palette of bright smudges in a rainbow of hues. She dabs a finger in what appears to be pure shimmer and looks into Sophie’s eyes.

  “You don’t mind do you?”

  “No, not at all.”

  “Good, let’s just play around a bit!”

  First she dusts Sophie’s eyebrows, brushing the hairs in the opposite direction, using a pale powder until they almost disappear. Then she taps a fingertip into the shimmer and sweeps it under Sophie’s brow. It feels good to have someone take such care to her face, not only the touch but the attention, the gaze. The sister dabs the same finger, this time in a coral, and pushes it into the cavity below Sophie’s brow bone, down to her inner eyelid.

  Then she pushes her pinky into another pot and presses fuchsia into the center of Sophie’s lips. She mimics pressing her own lips together, encouraging Sophie to do the same. When she sneaks her finger back to find another color, Sophie glances at the mirror. She looks otherworldly, this forest creature. With her eyebrows dusted away, the context of her face is suddenly foreign to her. For a moment, she doesn’t even recognize herself, and it feels truly liberating.

  “I think we got it,” the taller sister says, pulling off the soft tulle in one movement. She tosses it over her shoulder, where it lands in a beautiful cloud, and then begins unpinning the structure of Sophie’s costume.