Burning Down the House (25 page)

O
N THE HIGHWAY
she had not gone far when she started thinking about what might have happened to Poppy. There was no point in not imagining the worst. The problem of Poppy was an extension of the worst, as it unfurled, leaden, gray, like the highway itself. Cars pulled ahead, fell behind—mostly behind because she was speeding—some colorful, like occasional toys scattered along the road, odd moments of macabre joy on the journey. The joy did not take away the pain, and the pain did not take away the joy. There was some comfort in that. Some.

Along the sides of the highway the green trees blur and it always seems that there is something hidden behind the screen of color, some magnificent estate, some gleaming sculpture in a garden, some last idyllic tree behind the trees. Its bright fruit glistens. Its leaves dangle down. The rushing of the green gives the illusion that there is another world, and maybe there is, but as soon as you stop the car and get out to look for it the rushing ends, the trees separate, and you cannot find this garden.

The traffic gathered and slowed as she approached the bridge. Cars drifted like dead bodies on a river. The bridge loomed, at once majestic and ordinary. The water below, as she crossed the bridge, flowed molten and ferocious, forging on, implacable. Stalled in traffic she checked the GPS for directions to the spot in New Jersey, the gray circle where the app had last located Poppy. Neva knew that Poppy would not be there anymore, but she would probably not be far away. She would find her.

How are you going to do that? a voice in her head asked.

The same way I have done everything.

How is that?

By not worrying about myself.

You're very brave.

No, I'm not. I'm just determined.

Or out of your mind.

No, I'm in my mind. Very deeply in my mind.

She followed the line on the little screen. Watched it curve and turn and imitated its movements with her hands on the wheel. First she encountered tall apartment buildings, some houses. Factories, machinery. An endless road. Was this the Pulaski Skyway or the New Jersey Turnpike? She hadn't driven in so long. Angel had always done the driving. She could feel his presence as if he were in the seat beside her. Angel's daughter had asked to visit Neva and the boys. Her mother was too distraught to play with her anymore. Neva and Felix had entertained her with games and a walk in the park. She'd ridden the carousel. Saddled up on the orange pony with a turquoise bow in her hair, the bobbing and circling an outsize distraction, a celebration. She'd visited the sea lions, watched their bulging shadows as they leaped. She'd wondered at their muscular, flexible necks. Felix had taken her by the hand and they had marched, happy soldiers, underneath the turning clock with the bronze animals.

They say all roads lead to Rome, but on the globe today do all roads lead here, to this hotel with the smeared glass fish tank in the wall, the back room, the hidden business of buying people? Jonathan made it possible for Warren and Wolf to use some of the Zane properties without Steve knowing, at least for a little while. He probably would have found out, but Jonathan was willing to take the risk, to risk everything. Steve had set this in motion, that was how Jonathan looked at it, and perhaps he was right. But neither Steve nor Jonathan understood how complete the circle came, how perfectly circular was this globe. Neither of them saw Poppy sitting in the van that pulled up at the hotel, saw her get out with the others, saw her huddled in the back room, her fate the same abandonment, the same shipwreck, as the others', all oceans pouring into this dirty fish tank.

It's here, in the hotel, that you can see even more clearly what is going to happen, that you can feel the vibration, the distant rumblings, of the fall of the House of Steve. They can't see it clearly, don't really know it is happening, are not able to witness it, can't feel distinctly the trembling, or hear the avalanche.

Clouds race across the mountainside. In the fields, stalks whip back and forth. In the bright glade, animals rush by, darting out from their places. A bat, disoriented, flies through the window of the mansion in the daylight. Flaps frantically in the rafters. Wraps itself in a curtain, entangled, thrashes and whines. Knocks over a lamp from a desk. A bulb breaks. A hot wire touches paper. A flame alights.

She is dismissed from the hotel. Only a few girls needed today. She rides back in the van and weeps without letting anyone see because she knows now that her fate is unimportant. This is the depth of despair and the height of wisdom. But she feels neither despair nor wisdom, just a hollowing out of her hopes, whatever hopes she had left.

Through her teary reflection she sees the gritty unspectacular landscape of stores and multiplexes, restaurants and gas stations. Perhaps this is no different from what the world would look like after an apocalypse. She remembers someone telling her that she was already living postapocalypse, and she remembers remembering that thought and agreeing with it at a later time, but all of that seems like another life, as if she were only now actually, truly experiencing the end of the world. Maybe this is what the end of the world felt like? A continual rediscovery that it was ending.

Poppy had the dullest sense that at one time she would have found this idea humorous. Here, she found it sad, and she had no way to distract herself from the sadness. She realized that she used to pick and choose what she saw but now she saw all of it. The sweeping waste, the orphaned towns. They rolled through her reflection, rolled right over her, inside her, ruminating, brooding. They seemed to be the only things that wouldn't leave her, wouldn't leave her alone. It was as if her body had become a computer and the external world streamed across her skin, a three-dimensional screen in the shape of a young woman, bearing a constant flood of images that did not reflect her thoughts and feelings but replaced them. If she'd had the strength she could have seen herself as a beautiful machine, still capable of thought and feeling, ready to run like some fantasy action hero in a movie across this landscape of devastation and exact some justice. But she did not have the strength, not now. She was a screen in the shape of a person and she had been hacked.

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.