Leave the World Behind

by Rumaan Alam

  He pulled himself up to sitting, but slowly, his way of protest and his way of showing off the elastic efficiency of his adolescent body, an angled line morphing gradually from obtuse to acute.

  The back of her hand against his forehead, Amanda looked in her son’s eyes, bottomlessly beautiful to she who had made them, even when crusted and shrunken by sleep. “You don’t feel so warm anymore.” She put her palm against his forehead, his neck, his shoulder, his chest. “Does your throat hurt?”

  He didn’t know if his throat hurt. He hadn’t thought about it. His mother would not leave him to sleep until he cooperated, so he did, opening his mouth wide as though to yawn as a way of gauging the health of his throat. Seemed fine. “No.”

  Good mother, she ignored the boy’s sour breath. She looked into the pink recesses of his body as though she knew what she was looking for, or as though what was in there could be seen.

  Archie closed his mouth and then his tongue tapped a tooth, a tic, a test, and the salt of blood flowed over his taste buds. Familiar, but you remembered that, no matter what, the taste of blood. Curious, he ran his tongue over enamel again and the tooth yielded to that gentlest nudge. His mouth filled with saliva.

  Archie opened his mouth wider, and it spilled out, now, onto his neck, dribbled down his chest, saliva, drool, like a baby’s, cut with crimson that didn’t quite mix into it, like salad dressing insufficiently shaken. Blood was usually a surprise. His mouth continued to water, and to bleed. He put a finger to it, probing into the problem, and touched the tooth, and it fell over with a fleshy pop, down like a domino, onto his tongue and then, horribly, back into his mouth like a cherry pit almost swallowed. He spit it out, and the tooth landed in his palm. He stared at it. It was bigger than he’d have guessed.

  “Archie!” Amanda thought at first the boy was vomiting. That would have made more sense. But this was so controlled, so understated. He’d just leaned forward over his hand and dripped blood onto his bare chest.

  “Mom?” He was confused.

  “Are you going to be sick, honey? Get out of the bed!”

  Archie stood up and walked to mirror. “I’m not sick!” He held the tooth out in his palm, sticky and pink with blood.

  She did not understand.

  Archie looked at himself in the mirror. He opened his mouth and willed himself to confront the wet dark of it. He swooned a little, because it was disgusting. With his finger, he touched another tooth, a bottom one, and it, too, gave, then he grabbed onto it and pulled it right out of his gums, now near black with blood. Then another. Then another. Four teeth, tapered at the root, solid and white, four little pieces of evidence, four little proofs of life. Was he meant to scream? He closed his mouth and let the liquid gather there for a second, then spit it out onto the ground, not caring if he soiled the rug because what did that matter, really? Another of his teeth fell out and dropped onto the ground, where of course it did not make a sound. In the vast universe, it was too small to matter.

  “Archie!” Amanda did not know what was happening. Of course she didn’t.

  He crouched to the ground to pick up his tooth. It was bigger than the hollow little shells that he’d left under his pillow until he turned ten. It tapered at the root, animal and menacing. He held them in his palm like a diver proud of his pearls. “My teeth!”

  Amanda looked at her boy, slender and pathetic in his ticking-stripe boxer shorts. “What is it?”

  The boy did not weep because he was too baffled to. “Mom. Mom. My teeth.” He held his hand out for them to see.

  “Clay!” She didn’t know what to do but appeal to a second opinion. “My god, your teeth!”

  “What’s happening to me?” His voice was ridiculous because he couldn’t talk properly without the percussion of tongue against tooth.

  Amanda took the boy by the shoulders, steered him back to the bed. He was too tall otherwise. She pressed palm, then back of hand, to his forehead. “You’re not hot? I don’t understand—”

  Clay came as beckoned, towel at his waist, irritation on his face. “What’s happening?”

  “There’s something wrong with Archie!” Amanda thought it was evident.

  “What is it?”

  The boy held his hand out toward his father.

  Clay did not understand. Who would? “Honey, what happened?”

  “I was just—my tooth felt weird, and I touched it, and it fell out.”

  This was the moment. This was the ravine. Clay was going to lay his body down. “How is this—does he still have a fever?” Clay reached out to touch the boy’s arm, his neck, his back. “You’re warm—does he feel warm?”

  “I don’t know. I thought it wasn’t so bad, but I don’t know.” Amanda could not remember having said those words so many times. She didn’t know, she didn’t know, she didn’t know anything.

  Clay looked from the child to his wife, baffled. Maybe the boy was sick, maybe he was contagious? “It’s okay. You’re okay.”

  “I don’t feel okay!” But this wasn’t true. Archie felt . . . fine? As normal as possible. His body was working to keep it together. It would shed what was extraneous to preserve the whole.

  In some private part of himself, Clay stopped to see if all was well with his body. He did not know that it was not. Then he came awake, more truly, and looked at his son, bloody and toothless, and tried to think of what to do next.

  “Did you fill the bathtub?” Amanda was doing what she was able to. “It’s an emergency! We’ll need water!”

  34

  IT WAS CLAY’S INSTINCT TO CONSULT THE WASHINGTONS. Put four heads together. A conference, strength in numbers, the wisdom of their more advanced age, but none of them had ever seen anything like this. They huddled and inspected like Caravaggio’s Thomas and friends. Incredulity was about right.

  “You’re feeling all right, though?” Ruth didn’t see how that was possible.

  Archie just shrugged. He’d said it over and over again already.

  “Well. This is something. We need to think about getting him to the doctor.” G. H. felt this clear. “Not back in Brooklyn. Here.”

  “We have that pediatrician’s number.” Ruth had done her research for when Maya and Clara and the boys came to visit. They’d never had to use the information, but they had it.

  “He needs the emergency room,” G. H. said.

  Clay nodded, grave. Been there, done that, like any parent worth his salt. A glob of peanut butter lurking in a berry smoothie. An overconfident leap from the jungle gym. Labored breath one terrible winter night. “You’re right. This shouldn’t wait.” How he wished it could.

  “Where’s the hospital?” Amanda was unsure what to do with her body. She walked in circles, she stood and sat like a dog that can’t get comfortable. “Is it far?”

  “Maybe fifteen minutes—” G. H. looked to his wife for confirmation.

  “Farther, I think. You know these roads—it’s probably closer to twenty, maybe longer? I think it depends on if you take Abbott or cut over to the highway—” Ruth didn’t want to care. She didn’t want what it would entail. She couldn’t help herself. She was human. “Do you want some water or something?”

  Archie shook his head. “I don’t need to go to the hospital. I feel okay, I really do.”

  “We just need to be certain, honey.” Amanda actually wrung her hands like an amateur character actor. “You’ll give us directions? Unless someone’s phone has suddenly started working? No?”

  “I can give you directions,” G. H. said.

  “You’ll draw us a map. The GPS is no good. You’ll make us a map. And we’ll go.” Amanda went to the desk. Of course Ruth kept a cup of sharpened pencils, a pad of blank paper.

  “I can draw you a map. But it’s very simple once you get back to the main road—”

  “I got lost.” Clay put a hand on his son’s shoulder. He could barely look at them. “I got lost. Before.”

  “What do you mean?” Amanda asked. “Lost?”
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  “It’s not simple at all! I went out. To go and find out what was happening. To get to the bottom of—whatever. And I drove down the lane and I passed that egg stand and I thought I knew where I was going, and I was wrong. I drove around, then I turned around, then I was really lost. I don’t know how I found my way back. I heard that noise and I thought I was going to lose my mind and then there it was, the turn I had been looking for, the road up to the lane up to the house. It was just right there.”

  “So you didn’t see anyone. Or anything. You didn’t go anywhere.” Amanda sounded accusatory, but this was a relief: he hadn’t even had the chance to look! They were all overreacting. There was nothing. An industrial accident, those noises four consecutive controlled explosions, the power loss easily explained. Not great! But not the worst.

  “I could show you the way. We’ll go too. All of us.”

  “No.” Ruth was firm. Her whole body shook. “We’re not leaving. We’re not doing that. We’re waiting here. Until we hear something. Until we know something.” She would let them stay, but she wasn’t risking her life for them.

  “There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll drive them. We’ll talk to someone, find out what people know, maybe we’ll fill up the car, come right back here.”

  “You can stay. All of you. You can stay here, in this house, with us.” This was as far as Ruth could go. “Just stay here.”

  “Stay here.” Clay thought about it. He’d been thinking about it. “Until—until what?”

  “But George, you can’t leave. You can’t leave me here, and I can’t leave, and that’s where we are,” Ruth said.

  “What if it’s forever?” Amanda could not wait. Her son was sick. “What if the cell phones never come back—I mean, they barely worked out here before, when everything was normal. What if the power goes out, what if Archie is truly sick, what if we’re all sick, what if that noise made us sick?”

  “I’m not sick, Mom.” Why wasn’t anyone listening to him? He felt fine! Yes, it was weird his teeth had fallen out. But what was the doctor going to do—glue them back in? Something (his own instinct? some other very quiet voice?) told him to stay where they were.

  Ruth wondered what Maya was doing. She wondered why it seemed perfectly viable to her that her grandsons had heard that noise in Amherst, Massachusetts. They had only milk teeth, barely held in place at all. Maybe the noise had knocked those loose, and reduced their mothers to hysterics. If you couldn’t save your child, what were you doing? She knew they could not choose to stay with her, not when their child was sick. “I don’t think I can go out there.”

  “It will be fine.” G. H. couldn’t promise that. They’d all been waiting for some decisive moment. Some corner being turned. Perhaps this was it, the gradual descent into illogic, the frog finding that the water is at last too much to bear. The hottest year in recorded history, hadn’t he read that once? But the boy was sick, or something was wrong with him, and that was the only information they had. “You can wait here.”

  “I can’t stay here alone.”

  “We’ll pack up, we’ll go to the hospital, and then we’ll go back to Brooklyn,” Clay thought aloud. “You don’t need to drive us there. A map should be fine.”

  G. H. began to draw.

  “Or we could come back. We could leave Rose here with Ruth, and we can come back for her.” Amanda didn’t want the girl to have to see what was happening to her brother. She thought this might be less worrisome.

  “I can stay with Rose. I can even pack your things, you can go right now.” Ruth liked a project.

  “Fine.” Clay stood. That made more sense. Let the adults do what was needed. They’d come back for Rose.

  It was Amanda who realized, or Amanda who said it. The five of them had been so preoccupied by the situation. A shame: the perfect day. The light playing prettily across the pool, its reflection dancing across the back of the house, the green more lush from the rain, and not a cloud to be seen. “Where’s Rose?”

  35

  SHE WAS WATCHING THAT ONE MOVIE SHE’D FORGOTTEN she’d downloaded. Amanda looked in the girl’s bedroom, but the girl was not there. She was in the bathroom. Amanda went to look, but the girl was not there. Back to the living room. “I can’t find Rose?”

  They all agreed this made no sense. Clay went back to the master bedroom, which was empty. Amanda looked out the back door at the perfect day then in progress. Amanda looked into the laundry room, then went back to the master bedroom herself, not trusting Clay to be thorough. She looked in the walk-in closet, she looked under the bed, as though Rose were a house cat. She looked in the master bathroom, which still smelled of the violent rejections of their bodies.

  Clay found his wife in the hallway. “I don’t understand. Where is she?”

  Amanda returned to the girl’s room and peeled back the covers to see the foot of the bed, not sure, exactly, what she expected to find there. She hesitated before the bedroom closet like someone in a movie. Did the director intend a feint (Rose curled up with a book), or a shock (a stranger wielding a knife), or a puzzle (nothing at all)? There was just the smell of the cedar balls left to dissuade moths with a taste for cashmere. Now, then: panic, and at last, a concrete target upon which it could fix.

  Back to the living room, where Rose was not watching television or sitting with a book, to the kitchen, where Rose was not eating or working the too-hard Oriental-rug jigsaw puzzle, to the door overlooking the pool, but no, Rose had been forbidden to swim alone (just sensible). Amanda opened the front door as though she’d find the girl there, Trick or treat! Nope, just the grass, darkened by the fallen rain, and the chatter of birds.

  The girl was downstairs in the part of the house that most belonged to the Washingtons. She’d gone out to the garage to see what diversions it might hold. She was sitting in the car’s back seat, obedient as a certain kind of dog, ready for the trip home. Okay, louder: “Rosie!”

  “Rosie, Rosie.” Amanda said it to herself. She went back into the bathroom. Once the girl had loved to hide and surprise them. Amanda pulled back the shower curtain to find only the tub full of an inch of water. She’d told Clay to fill the tub, and this was what he’d come up with? She went back to the living room. “I can’t find Rose.”

  Clay wanted another glass of water. “Well, she has to be here somewhere.” He gestured toward the bedrooms.

  “She’s not there—” Why wasn’t he listening?

  “She’s taking a shower?”

  “She’s not—” She was not stupid!

  “She’s in the—” He didn’t know what he meant any longer.

  “She’s not, she’s not, I looked, she’s not anywhere, where is she?” Amanda was not yelling, but she was not whispering.

  “Did you look downstairs?” Archie’s tone was withering.

  “I’ll look downstairs.” G. H. stood. “She’s probably just exploring the house.”

  “I can’t find her?” Amanda put it as a question because it seemed so silly—I can’t find her! I can’t find my child! Like saying you couldn’t find your earlobes or your clitoris.

  Amanda went and stood in the kitchen, unsure what to do next. Ruth followed because she was moved to reassure her. That damnable instinct. She had to help. They were colleagues not as mothers but humans. This—all this—was a problem to be shared. “She must be outside.” Ruth could picture the girl, watching monarchs flex their wings on the milkweed. “She’s gone to play.”

  “I looked out front.”

  “Let’s go outside.”

  Clay sat beside his son again. “Amanda. Calm down. Let’s think. She could be in the garage, or out past the hedge, let’s just go find her—”

  “What the fuck do you think I’m doing, Clay? I’m going to get my shoes to go find her.” Amanda rushed toward the bedroom.

  “Archie, do you know where your sister went?” Clay was patient.

  Archie spoke softly. Did he? He had an instinct, but it didn’t make sense. “N
o.”

  Amanda came back in her slip-on Keds. She didn’t even have tears in her anymore. “I feel insane. Where is Rose?”

  “I’m sure she’s just outside.” Ruth wasn’t all that sure of anything.

  Amanda should have screamed, but there was no scream. The fact that she was so quiet was somehow more unsettling. “Get your shoes on and help me fucking look for her.”

  Through the door, Clay could see his rubber thongs by the hot tub. “I’ll go out front, by the herb garden. I’ll look past the hedge.”

  “She’s just wandered somewhere.” Ruth tried to convince. “There’s no television, so she’s playing the way we used to, just wandering about. There’s nothing to worry about here.” She meant: there was no traffic, there were no kidnappers. There were no bears or mountain lions. There were no rapists or perverts, no people at all. They were equipped to handle certain fears. This was something else. It was hard to remind yourself to be rational in a world where that seemed not to matter as much, but maybe it never had.

  Downstairs, G. H. found his closet, packed with supplies, his bed, tidily made, his bathroom, the mute and useless television, the broken back door, his cell phone plugged into its optimistic white cables. He put the phone into his pocket.

  In the living room, Archie stuffed his feet into his Vans and used his tongue to contemplate the tender empty pockets in his gums. They were soft and pleasant, like the recesses of the human body his own was designed to fit into, something he’d never know firsthand. Could he forgive the universe that denial of his own particular purpose? He wouldn’t get the chance. He opened the back door and went to join his father, went to find his sister.

  “There’s nothing to worry about?” Amanda’s imagination, exhausted, had given up. She went outside with the rest of her family, into that beautiful day, too distracted to notice if it was different from the thousands of other days of her life thus far. Her “Rose! Rose!” was loud and impassioned enough to startle animals she couldn’t see and would never know were there.