Afterparty (17 page)

I thought, who locks a kids’ bedroom door from the outside? What about fires? I went to the single window and opened the drapes. They were blocked by steel bars, like the grates that had sealed off the Elegant Lady salon. So either the parents were afraid of the little girls running away, or were terrified of rapists. Or maybe the Millies required that every house in the neighborhood included a room that could double as a cell.

The girl’s taste in décor indicated a future as an Elegant Lady; the walls and the bedclothes all vibrated in the same annoying end of the spectrum as the salon. The covers of the twin bed were pulled back, leaving an empty space where the girl had slept in a nest of stuffed animals.

Dr. G said, “Have you noticed there are no electronics? No screens, no pens. Even the stuffed animals are nonrobotic. And look, books!
Paper
books.” She was trying to distract me.

“That little girl,” I said. “She was so pretty.”

“I didn’t notice. Now, about tomorrow—”

“Please, just … stop talking.” I lay down in the bed. It was still warm.

Dr. Gloria took a seat across the room. My personal night-light. I rolled away from her and pulled one of the pillows to my belly.

THE PARABLE OF

the Million Bad Mothers

There was a woman who gave birth to a beautiful child, and after the nurse washed and bundled the infant in new blankets she came to the mother and said, “Would you like to hold the baby?”

The woman noticed that the nurse did not say
your
baby or
your
daughter. The staff had been informed of the situation, and were careful to avoid possessive nouns.

The woman ached to hold the child. But should she? What cascade of effects would result from that act? This was the first decision she would have to make in the next seventy-two hours, and it paralyzed her.

The fetus had been exposed to a massive amount of NME 110. No one knew what effect the dose had already had on the child’s developing brain or what the prognosis would be. The mother knew firsthand what permanent damage the drug could inflict on adult tissue, and neither she nor the doctors had any right to expect a mentally healthy child. Initial tests were inconclusive. The girl had low APGAR scores, but she was also born four weeks premature. Only time would tell.

On the bedside table was a multipage form labeled “Final and Irrevocable Surrenders for Adoption.” Not one surrender, the mother thought, but an unknowable number of them, a surrender for every day of the rest of her life.

It would be her decision to sign the form or not. She did not want to make this decision, and was surprised that anyone in her mental condition would be allowed to. She was clearly not sane. On the other hand, the law made it clear that insanity did not automatically render you unfit for parenthood (see: Everyone v. Their Parents).

There were other complicating factors. The mother was a dual citizen of the United States and Canada; the other legal parent, though dead, was survived by a wealthy family who might sue for custody; and the newborn herself was American. Any adoption forced upon the mother by DCFS would be jurisdictionally murky. So: It would be the mother’s signature, and hers alone, that would deliver the child unto strangers.

But not yet. The state of Illinois mandated a waiting period after the child’s birth, and the mother could not take that final, irrevocable step until the time had elapsed.

Three days. Seventy-two hours. 259,200 seconds.

The woman considered the waiting period to be a punishment. Social services did not realize that being forced to make the decision was itself a life sentence. No, more than that: the sentence of an infinite number of lifetimes. The number of variables she had to consider created not some branching tree, but a node diagram like those models of the human mind created by naïve computer scientists, each node connected to the others by input and output lines, some strong, some weak. The number of paths through those nodes was impossible for her to calculate. Almost any result could come out of a system that complicated.

In some lifetimes, the girl exhibited no effects from the drug. Her IQ was high, her emotions stable, her grasp on reality as firm as any child’s.

In other lifetimes, a doctor found a drug to make the mother sane, and she was released from the hospital. The mother, who had refused to sign the adoption papers, was reunited with her daughter before the girl was old enough to remember the absence.

Or, the mother signed and the girl was adopted by a loving family with all the emotional and financial resources to deal with a brain-damaged child.

In other lifetimes, the girl exhibited no symptoms of Numinous until the age of twelve, when she developed early-onset schizophrenia. There were incidents of violence. The adoptive parents—good people, but unprepared for such a destructive child—institutionalized the girl.

In yet other lifetimes the mother refused to give up custody, and so when she failed to get better—in fact, got worse year by year—the daughter was shuffled from one foster home to another, never knowing the love of parents, never knowing a permanent home.

In some lifetimes, the institution the daughter found herself in was full of highly trained, caring people, who knew how to help the girl achieve her potential. She managed her mental disorder and went on to public high school, where she excelled in science and math.

In some lifetimes, the mother insisted upon a closed adoption, and the daughter, confused and terrified by the strange workings of her mind, unable to tell the difference between reality and hallucination, and unable to reach out to her biological mother for explanations, stole a box cutter from her adopted father’s toolbox and carved her own kind of sense into her skin. Pain was real. Pain was something she could hold onto.

In the lifetimes in which the mother allowed for an open adoption, the precocious daughter Googled her mother’s name and was horrified; the girl’s own anxieties, which she had been told were experienced by
lots
of other children, suddenly seemed more sinister, not normal at all, the symptoms of a latent defect that would cause her to live in fear of her own mind for the rest of her life.

And so on. Each node that was touched sent a ripple across the web of possibilities.

The nurse asked a second time, “Would you like to hold her?”

Again the mother could not answer. Her bones felt as fragile as balsa wood. If the nurse placed the baby in her arms, the mother would split and shatter, and if she did not fall apart she would not be able to let the child go.

It was then that an angel of the Lord who had been watching nearby spoke. “You’ve got to stop this,” she said. The mother’s mind was filled with nodes and glowing lines, the dreams and nightmares multiplying by the second.

The angel removed her glasses and said, “Listen to me. What the child needs in this moment is to be held.”

The mother shouted, “You don’t know that!
I
don’t know that, so you don’t!” She said this aloud. She had not yet learned the skill of talking silently to her angel. Yet immediately she realized the mistake. The nurse stepped back from the bed and turned aside, an unconscious movement to protect the baby. Then she left the room.

“God
damn
it!” the mother shouted. She picked up the plastic water bottle and threw it at her angel. The IV tube ripped from her arm. The bottle clattered against the far wall.

The mother put her hand to her bleeding arm. She was dehydrated and did not have tears to waste, but still she wept. She was delusional. She knew that this was the way schizophrenics thought. This was the way her own mother had behaved before they took her away. All her life she’d been on guard, watching for signs of her mind twisting toward its genetic predisposition. She’d armed herself with advanced degrees. She was determined that she would not become her mother. And she prayed, as only an atheist can pray, that her own daughter would not inherit the damage.

The angel of the Lord waited for perhaps a minute, then went to the mother’s bedside and placed an arm around her shoulders.

“You’re imaginary,” the mother said.

“It’s true,” the angel said.

Still, the woman was grateful for that cool touch. Proof, if any more was needed, that she was unfit to be a mother.

“I’m a murderer,” she said to the angel.

“You did not kill Mikala,” the angel said, but the woman could not trust her. The angel’s job, the mother believed, was to comfort her, to tell her things she wanted to hear, and show her what she needed to see.

She decided to sign the form. Her daughter deserved a real mother, a loving mother, who had not committed terrible crimes.

She held fast to that decision for several minutes. Then she thought, But what if…?

There were 71 hours and 30 minutes to go.

—G.I.E.D.

CHAPTER TWELVE

East of the city the 401 rode the lip of Lake Ontario like a dare until it lost courage and angled north into farmland. I’d grown up in a small town an hour north of that highway, and I’d traveled a good chunk of the road from Windsor to Quebec. It was a boring drive, and I was exhausted. Despite the fact that I was traveling against my will with armed gangsters, the trip would be a five-hour exercise in maintaining consciousness.

Throughout the night I’d dreamed of white corridors, then awoke suffocating, unable to catch my breath. For the rest of the day I’d been kept prisoner in the family living room by Aaqila’s mother, a woman only a few years older than me who spoke adequate English. I never caught her name. She fed me microwave lasagna and orange soda and forced us to watch a marathon rebroadcast of her favorite reality show,
Beam Me Up!
Each episode, a wealthy first-world family switched places for a month with a third-world one. It was evidently a huge hit. Half the show, the audience could chuckle warm-heartedly at yokels from Darfur oohing and aahing over the Albertson’s produce section; the other half they could laugh out loud at white Republicans from Ohio pulling ticks off their asses.

Aaqila came in and out of the living room, but spent most of the time in another part of the house, playing the sulky babysitter. Dr. Gloria and I talked about running away. We were pretty sure I wouldn’t get far in this neighborhood. Plus Aaqila still had my boots and other belongings, including the pen. God, I itched for a phone. All I wanted was two minutes with a keypad. If I couldn’t reach Ollie, I was never going to get out of Canada, at least not breathing. Fayza would find out soon enough that there was no chemjet coming by boat from America, and I’d find out soon enough what it was like to be dead.

Just before episode nine of
Beam Me Up!
—“The Mackenzies of Colorado are arrested by North Korean police!”—Aaqila’s mother paused the screen and went into the kitchen to make us a snack. Something glimmered at the edge of my vision, and Dr. Gloria said, “The writing is on the wall.”

Red letters flickered across the striped wallpaper. It said:
Been listening.

“Are you doing that?” I said to Gloria.

Gloria put up her hands. “Don’t look at me.”

The words changed—a longer sentence. I jumped from my seat, and my body obstructed some of the message. I turned toward the living room window. There was a two-foot gap between the curtains, and through it I could see a few people on the street. One of them, standing directly across from the window, was a figure in a baseball cap and heavy jacket who could have been a twelve-year-old boy.

I stepped back. The message changed again. Three more sentences written in flickering laser light appeared. Dr. Gloria studied them with me, memorizing them.

Aaqila’s mother walked into the room. “Ready?” she asked.

The words were still glowing on the wall. I jumped toward the woman and took the bowl she was carrying. It was full of assorted nuts mixed with a spice that smelled like rosemary.

“Are these an Afghan snack?” I asked, trying to keep her attention on me. “They look delicious.”

“I got them at Whole Foods,” she said, and reached for the remote.

“Clear,” Dr. Gloria said. The words had disappeared.

I tried to look as bored and anxious as I had all day, but inside I was almost collapsing from relief. Ollie had told me that pens were tracking devices, and ever since Hootan had picked me up at Bobby’s apartment I’d been praying that she was following me. Now I knew that she’d done more than that: She’d tracked me, listened in, and formed a plan.

Sometime around 5 p.m. Hootan arrived, and we started the long haul to Cornwall. Dr. G sat up front. Aaqila sat beside me in the backseat, looking unhappy. In her lap she held a pink nylon Mr. Squiggly lunchbox. She spent the entire time with her pen open, talking to … who? Other emo girls on TalentForTorture.com? The WillingToWaterboard social network?

The sun dropped behind us, filling the car with light for perhaps a half hour before it sank below the horizon. We drove in the dark for another two hours, no one speaking. Hootan wore his glasses, blinking messages or watching a show, an absurdly dangerous thing to do. Aaqila stayed glued to her pen.

I said, “That’s the place.” A sign announced the Morrisburg Service Center in five kilometers.

“I don’t like this,” Hootan said.

“Well too bad. They told me to pull over there and wait for further instructions, so that’s what we’re going to do.” Aaqila didn’t involve herself in the argument.

Hootan took the exit ramp. The rest area was a vast, empty parking lot somehow made more vast and empty by the three semitrailers parked under the lights. No cars I could see, which worried me. A paved road led off into the trees to the right, toward what I assumed to be a picnic area.

Hootan pulled up to the only building, a brown rectangular shed that had been built by the government but ceded to a “Snoopy’s,” a convenience store chain I’d never heard of.

“You have the pen?” I asked Aaqila.

“Stop asking me that.”

“Is it turned on?”