In the yard with David’s pills, Remy disappears as he emerges, and afterward—she feels better, not worse. Any remnants of David are welcome company, not ghosts. She doesn’t feel haunted; she feels enchanted.
She has at least three more days with David before this long goodbye will be their last. More if she starts splitting his pills into smaller doses. She has considered telling her mother. After the last pill, of course, so she couldn’t take them away. Later, as a kind of plea. Her mother owes her. Isn’t this the kindest solution? Letting Remy live with David, in some way. It’s what her mother does, after all; why couldn’t she make just a few more of his pills? Maybe if she shows her mother how much better she has been doing, with the pills, maybe then she will understand. What a life. She could take him anywhere.
The yogurt Remy brought out smells sour beside her in the grass. She can feel her skin burning. She should take a cold shower before her mother comes at her with the sunscreen; before she looks in her eyes and sees. Remy stands to head inside. She stumbles at first, her head spinning. She must have underestimated the amount still left in her.
Today’s pill was David’s earlier memories, mostly with his mother, tender and vulnerable in ways Remy never felt. As she opens the back door to the kitchen, Remy slips into another one—the outline of David’s mother holding him with outstretched arms, looking up at him, at her, on horseback. The faint scratch of the horse’s hair on her legs. Remy hears her mother’s wretched voice from upstairs, calling to her through the fields and the birds chirping where she, David, is riding, faster and faster. She wants to stay here, with him and his mother.
Remy turns around and slams the screen door behind her, afraid her mother might find her. Her mother, always scrutinizing, would be able to tell. Remy runs toward the street, enjoying the drunken feeling of being on the edge between these two moments, feeling her own feet stumble as David’s kick the horse to go faster, until they are both galloping and the world is flying by—spring flowers blurring below them, cars whizzing beside her.
Remy holds her arms out, leaning her head back as she runs along the sidewalk, feeling the flutter of David’s excitement and fear as the horse goes faster, as his heart beats faster, and as the world blurs even more around them, until suddenly the memory switches. David is at baseball practice, swinging the giant bat, his hands choked up high. Remy’s feet stumble on the uneven sidewalk, but she wants to stay in it, to see him swing, to feel him connect with the ball, and she stumbles again, her foot skipping a step below and then finding smoothness, but now she sees nothing but David’s hands swinging and the crack of the bat, the ball flying up toward the bright, bright sun, and then—a screeching that feels as though her pupils are splitting in two—
Remy opens her eyes just in time to see the flash coming at her, and then the pavement askew off the side of her face. And then there are footsteps slamming, their vibrations entering her head before they can even become sounds, and then screams, and sirens and nothing but darkness.
* * *
Angelica wakes slumped in her chair. She feels heavy but tender. She brushes her hair behind her ear, surprised to find it wet, tears pooled in the curves of her cartilage. Her office, her entire world, appears dull.
What has she done?
She stole from her own daughter. The person she loved. Even if David’s death wasn’t Angelica’s fault, she took him from Remy. She removed him.
She convinced herself that this was kind, better. But what she meant was that it was cleaner. Now she feels the violation, the depth of her transgression. She couldn’t have known best—not for someone she barely knows.
She took her memories. She took her memories. How will she face her? Again, Angelica has robbed herself of the person she wants most to be close to. Violated the sacred space between them. Made them forever far. Only this time, unlike with Sahar, Angelica sides with Remy. She understands her daughter, at last.
Chapter 28 TODAY
The Center feels empty even with the same number of patients. The seats in the common area fill up as normal, bodies staring off at the ocean, into the fire, or at their hands. Patients leave and new ones come. This has happened multiple times since Sophie arrived. But this time it feels like less sunlight fills the space. How is it possible that the only person who has seen her, who maybe ever saw her, did so here? When it is hard to imagine anything left to see?
You can’t love something so desperately in a moment like that and hope to keep it.
One of the new patients, the one who took Lucien’s room, walks by Sophie, whispering in bursts. For days, this woman has been finding her, and maybe others, then muttering as she passes. Sometimes the words are so soft they enter Sophie’s mind like thoughts, for her to realize only later, once she sees the woman passing. It’s against the rules, this kind of confession, but Sophie senses the woman needs to say it. And needs it to be heard.
Was Lucien right? Sophie cannot stop wondering now that he’s gone. Maybe he did the only kind thing in pulling away. Maybe it makes him all the more attractive, that he had not wanted to risk her progress. He could’ve done whatever he wanted and then left; he could have told her about Liv later on, or never at all. And if he wanted to protect Liv, too, doesn’t that make him all the better person?
In the moment, his worrying about Liv was too painful to fully process. The mortification of realizing you’ve been thinking about someone while they thought of someone else was too much. If only Sophie had taken a breath. Taken a moment to think. She might’ve agreed with him. She doesn’t want to hurt Liv either. Maybe this newfound understanding is simply Sophie willing away the pain, wishing back the feeling that knowing him had filled her with. That hazy sort of happiness.
Lucien did help her. Regardless of how it ended, or her unwillingness to say goodbye, Sophie knows that much. Maybe some people surface to lead you places. He reminded her of who she is, of what is out there. Sophie remembers now what it feels like to want something so badly you cannot bear it. A determination she lost, and one she will need in order to get out of here.
What was she expecting? It isn’t enough to be loved. That won’t fix her. She has to find the strength, and no one can do that for her. Even if Lucien could have saved her, Sophie doesn’t want to be saved. She wants to be met.
We held each other tighter knowing we would lose.
She had gotten distracted. Love is not everything. It is something, but not in her control. Love cannot live inside this place. Sophie needs to leave, and for her to leave, she needs to focus. She needs to believe that maybe the next treatment will work, and if not that one, the one after. And the one after that. Until finally, finally, she is free.
I only saw his feet.
Sneakers. Those clumsy feet that took my whole life from me even as I held it, hot.
After days of disconnected phrases, Sophie starts to find a linear pattern. Her mind, desperate for a task, pieces together what happened to the woman by remembering and ordering the phrases in a sort of catalog. Sophie, who had to write down every order at the Chateau, lest she mix up every table. Amazing, she thinks, what the mind is capable of when deprived of stimuli.
Sophie first noticed her because almost all of the patients at the Center are male. Either women are too smart to binge on other people’s lives, with too much to worry about in their own heads already, or plenty of women are using, too, they’re just better at suffering in silence. Hiding their pain at any cost. Sophie had sooner thrown herself off a ledge than ask for help. At least that’s what she’s been told, of course; she can’t remember a thing from the weeks leading up to her admission, but the scratches match the story.
By the time she realizes the sum of this new patient’s pain, Sophie believes the human capacity for loss is boundless. Just when you think you’re at the edge, you learn that it moves.
We died in each other’s arms. Holding on and hoping, which is not unlike how lived. And yes I say we, knowing I’m still here, but that was it
for me and I knew it then. I felt the last of him beat beside me. The floor was sticky, like it was keeping us there. Part of me hoped the smallness of that—the inconvenience of the details, that stickiness on the floor—might keep us both safe. But more bullets came and more bodies crowded ours and we held each other tighter, knowing we would lose. You can’t love something so desperately in a moment like that and hope to keep it. I felt the last of him beside me, then quiet. I only saw the feet. Sneakers. New ones, can you imagine? Those clumsy shuffling feet that thought to get new sneakers, before. That took my whole life from me even as I held it, hot.
One afternoon, just the two of them by the glass wall, the woman tells Sophie more. She was in trauma therapy for a bit, after the shooting. After four months she still couldn’t stop the shaking. She’d had to leave her job. She couldn’t drive herself to work, and it cost more than she made to take a Drivr from Pasadena to Culver City each day at rush hour. The Memoroxin therapy started as exposure treatments—reliving pieces of the “event” as they called it, focusing on the details. Facing it again, then letting it pass. Accepting what happened just as it had occurred. But the pills only made things worse; it felt like tearing her open each time she felt her husband’s body in her arms again, each time he wasn’t yet gone.
His breath, the smell of beer lingering from the concession stand. Such expensive beer, she said. He had more than usual. They were having fun. He had his hands on her waist as they swayed to the music. His body held the warmth they worked up dancing, even after. On the ground. She couldn’t get up; she waited until the police had done two rounds before she said anything, before she made a noise, incapable of words. Waiting as if she still had the choice to follow him out of this world. As if they could’ve stayed together.
She went through every therapy for PTSD. There was discussion of removing the event altogether, but she objected. She couldn’t lose a moment with him, even her last.
One day, a neighbor who’d walked their dog since they were first married found her on the floor of their bathroom, the empty bottle in the sink. Thirty pills in her system. The sedatives in them would’ve been enough to kill her if the neighbor hadn’t come that day.
But what a way to go, awash in the highlights reel of your own life. Maybe that’s all death is anyway, she says, maybe that’s how it comes. All through the woman’s story, Sophie thinks of Lucien. Selfish is the brain in pain.
* * *
That night Sophie is led into a new treatment room next to the one she has visited so many times before. A glossy white immersion tank is full of glowing water. This new technology increases the penetration of memories and insulates patients from any infiltrating stimuli, Sophie is told, before a nurse drops a pill into her hand and then leaves.
Privacy, as if she has anything left to herself.
She looks at tonight’s pill, same as all the rest. From what Sophie now remembers from her life before, she always tried so hard. Always. And yet here she is, stripped down and shivering. Afraid to try yet another treatment, another promise to restore what was never hers. Before, she spent so much energy orienting herself so that she would never have to fail, so she would never face the shame of being disagreeable to or disliked by anyone.
In the memories she takes in her room at night, she is overwhelmed by a feeling she had gotten so used to then that it was like air. Sophie had always felt on the edge of something. Failure. Expectation. Perfectionism was a means of self-preservation. She found safety in it. But the more it worked, the more she succeeded and the better she became at pleasing others, the closer she felt to losing it. Constantly. And the more she had to lose.
Even her fear had felt necessary. One family only gets so many mistakes, and her brother had taken the allotted amount for theirs. And yet despite falling, she survived. At least, she is surviving, so far. She wasn’t allowed to, but she did. When she takes her pills now, the latent insecurity in those memories feels far away, and the fear that held her back even as she reached with success in plain sight feels no longer her own. Maybe, of that, she is finally free.
Sophie shivers, still standing there naked. She is nervous at the thought of her claustrophobia in that narrow plastic coffin, but as soon as her skin touches the lukewarm water, and her ears submerge, she is overwhelmed with calm. A gentle mist fills the air above the water level. Her heart tingles. In the immersion tub, her body feels contained. With the water sloshing around her, she feels, finally, constant. Like everything inside her is warm enough to thaw.
Her mind drifts as the water laps up against her neck, as she splashes beside her brother in the lake, as she picks wild raspberries for her mother and sneaks a few dirty, as she spins and spins until she loses sight of the audience.
PART THREE
SHAPIRO: And what about those who might say, such dirty water may never be clean?
DR. SLOANE: To them I say, that is what medicine is for. That is what I’ve dedicated my life to—helping the hopeless. That is the foundation of every medical practice. Streptococcus seems incurable, deadly, brutal—until you discover penicillin.
Chapter 29 TODAY
Everything startles him.
The smell of the air freshener, a pirouetting pine tree just below the rearview mirror in the Drivr they ordered him from the Center—New York rainstorms, a cab so muggy he draws on its windows, the city through his fingertips, raindrops glowing red in the stopped traffic. The sound of another car radio blaring out of tune from the adjacent lane along the Pacific Coast Highway—hazy pavement, barbecue smoke in his eyes. Cherry Life Savers from the Drivr’s backseat console—running through the sprinkler in Prospect Park. He sucks the flavor until the disk turns sharp.
Each new sensation jolts Lucien out of the car slowly heading south, as if pieces of his memory are being turned on from a control room previously unmanned for weeks. Two weeks. That’s how long he was at the Center, they said, when he asked before leaving. Though attaching an amount to a gap of time does nothing to fill the void. Two weeks, when you can’t remember it, sits restless inside you.
The salty breeze along the Pacific Coast Highway reminds Lucien of where he is. Alone in a driverless car heading back to the life he had, apparently, chosen to leave again and again. Alone for the first time in weeks, it seems, although now who’s to say? He doesn’t want to think about what might have happened in that glass sanctuary; what could be so bad, or proprietary, that it couldn’t leave with him? Either way, this seems an appropriate return. No need to make small talk while you slowly reenter the world. Given the traffic, he will be desperate, not worried, by the time they reach Echo Park. At least stepping out of the car will feel less of a risk than a respite.
Around Santa Monica, they—the automated system and Lucien—turn inland for the 405, which soon takes them up past Bel Air, the Getty Museum hovering on the hillside. Imagining those inside, for whom the museum is the most necessary place to be today, makes Lucien desperately jealous. Even those stuck in traffic beside him on the 405 make him jealous. Even the miserable-looking ones. Their misery looks simple by comparison. At least they know it.
The car moves across the city, in real life and on the screen of his shattered phone, where it occasionally jumps forward then back, whether a glitch in the app or the kaleidoscopic effect of his fractured screen. He was given his phone wrapped in plastic to keep the glass intact, and though he can’t remember breaking it, he’s somewhat comforted that even through the plastic his touch still activates and commands the screen. Still human, after all.
By the time they drop down through the Hollywood Hills and along Franklin Avenue, where chic art deco apartment buildings conjure Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler, Lucien thinks only of his grandmother. He was also told before leaving the Center that it was her Mem he took. A simple discharge report, which listed that as his reason for admission (“Status: dissociated, signs of overdose”) and nothing else. He didn’t believe them. He can’t imagine what might have driven him to do such
an irresponsible thing, and hard as he searches, he comes up with only the emptiness that lingers inside of him. A sadness, still. His mother. But he would never have risked his grandmother’s progress for his own selfishness.
He wouldn’t have.
Would he?
He looks at his phone again and swipes away the double-digit messages and voicemails still loading. He calls his grandmother’s number, but no one answers. He curses the nurses, so short-staffed. He imagines Trina, sitting beside Florence, willing the phone to stop, for now, so it doesn’t wake her. He can hardly acknowledge his guilt over having left his grandmother for so long. But alongside that, he feels a pang of hope that she might’ve had a breakthrough while he was away. That’s it. The nurses are not there to answer the phone. And when he comes over later, Florence will greet him at the door.
Though anxious to see her, he wants to go home first. To shower. To put on fresh clothes. He doesn’t want to alarm her, after weeks away, showing up looking disheveled. At least not more than usual. When the car slows to stop across the street from the Victorian on Laguna Avenue, the house looks less polished than he remembers, and a bit less inviting. Or maybe he just imagines himself less welcome. He doesn’t want to see Liv. How could he? He cannot remember the details, nothing at all once he was using, so he has no idea what he might have done, or how he might have treated her. He hardly even knows how he got to the Center; they mentioned a young woman, who had pulled every string to get him in, but of course he can’t remember more. There was too much Mem in Lucien for those memories to belong to him now.
The Shimmering State Page 29