Find Me (24 page)

It's cold in the basement. Cobwebs sag from the ceiling like dead skin.

We can't help it. We stare at Darcie.

“I told you there was a ritual,” she says, as though that explains everything.

We watch her open the steel door and slip inside the tunnel. She's gone for a long time. I look at Marcus and imagine him naked in the basement. I see his long thighs and the tight mass of his balls. The strangeness of a masked face against all that hairless skin. I pick up the eyedropper and look at the residue inside. It smells like nothing.

“I want to go in there,” I say to Marcus.

“I remember my mother well enough,” he says. “I don't need to hear her voice.”

“Speak for yourself,” I say.

In a corner, we find a plastic baby doll with a missing arm and a dark bow-shaped mouth. We take turns putting on Darcie's wings. I walk around the basement with the weight of them on my back. We wait for the door to open and for Darcie to come out and tell us all about what she's heard in there.

When the door finally creaks open and Darcie spills into the basement, she's crying. Her hair is stuck to her cheeks. She crosses her arms over her stomach and shivers.

“What's wrong?” we want to know.

I pick up her sweater and try handing it to her. Above us there is the rumble of falling pins. “Did you not hear her?”

“Sometimes you don't hear what you wish you would,” Darcie says.

*   *   *

One night, in the living room, Darcie tells us about this idea she has for a city with only one building. When we point out that a city with only one building can't really be considered a city, she says we don't understand.

We are taking turns drinking from the green bottle. The oil lamp is stationed on the floor and I watch an ant crawl through the circle of light. It looks injured.

“Everything cities have would exist in this one building.” Darcie reaches into the fireplace. She finds a stick and starts drawing her city in the air. A large moth touches down on a lamp shade, then flies over to a window and beats the glass with its wings.

“The building would be so tall, it would reach the stratosphere. That's between the troposphere and the mesosphere, in case you didn't know. It would hold millions of people, no, billions, billions of people, and roads and schools and police stations and museums and train stations and airports and restaurants.”

“That sounds crowded,” Marcus says.

“It's a stupid idea for a city.” Nelson reaches for the bottle, his pale arm thrusting into the light.

Babylon, I think, imagining a stone tower ascending into the clouds. Where have I heard about Babylon before?

“No one would ever be lost,” Darcie says, as though she hasn't heard our misgivings. She gets the bottle next.

“Imagine this instead,” Nelson tells us, taking over.

He tells us to imagine getting so tangled up inside yourself that you would do anything for a way out. To imagine the lure of forgetting, of wiping it all away. He tells us that what separates us from animals is not logical thought but our ability to set our own traps. What if we could get away from all that? None of the infected remember how they contracted the sickness—how could they? The sickness was designed to erase who we were. Who could say how it all started?

“It started with Clara Sue Borden.” I slurp from the green bottle and feel the words turn to syrup in my mouth. “Everyone knows that. It started with California.”

“Imagine,” Nelson says, raising a finger. “That this is something we did to ourselves.”

Rain beats the skylight. I hear scratching in the walls.

“Take Darcie here,” he continues. By now Darcie has forgotten all about her city with only one building. She is lying on the floor. The tops of her wings are brushing her ears. Her mouth is open. Her eyes look wet and empty. “The trick was getting her so far outside herself that she was able to stand back and see that she could still remember, could always remember. That she could see that she was well.”

On the floor, Darcie does not look well.

“I went to an official place, to try and talk to official people, but no one wanted to hear about it.”

“Where?” I put the green bottle down. I feel a shiver of curiosity.

“Where what?”

“Where was this official place?”

“Far away. Someplace far away and cold.” Nelson claws at his arms. His skin is dotted with little red sores. “Those official people didn't want what I knew, so now Darcie gets to have it.”

She rolls over on her back, crushing her wings. Feathers shoot out from underneath her arms.

Nelson starts talking about the rash of postepidemic suicides. Arlington Memorial Bridge, Tobin Bridge, Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. Bayonne Bridge, where the jumper self-immolated, so that when she leaped she was a burning ball of light, so there would be zero chance of survival. He tells us the sickness is over and everywhere people are using bridges not for crossing but for jumping and what are we supposed to think about that.

“So, as I am illustrating, there is still a lot to be cured.”

The bottle is almost empty. Nelson spins it around in his hands.

“How have you done such a good job of keeping up with the news?” I want to know.

I don't want to admit that I've been thinking about all the suicides and disappearances too, trying to calculate how much damage a person can take before it becomes unsurvivable.

“The people with means,” Darcie mumbles from the floor. “They play their radio way too loud.”

Nelson tells us about his old job, at a facility that cared for people who didn't belong in a hospital, but didn't belong on their own either. Assisted living, you could call it. I wonder if that's the kind of place Ms. Neuman ended up in.

At this facility, they had a patient who woke every morning coated in bruises. The doctors checked her out and worked up her blood; no one could understand the cause. The facility installed a camera in her room, thinking they might catch one of their own staff mistreating this patient, but instead on the footage they watched this woman get up in the middle of the night and ram her body into the bed posts, the dresser corners, the closet door. The whole time she was doing it to herself.

I think of the cutters in the homes, the girls who sliced themselves up in the night and came to breakfast with long red cuts on the undersides of their arms, the skin hot and raised. Those were the girls who wanted to get noticed, to show off how much pain they could take. The ones who didn't wore long-sleeved shirts in the summertime and used loose razor blades to sever the skin between their toes.

I think about those girls and Dr. Bek and the hospital in Oslo, about how it all connects back to the unconscious mind.

Nelson finishes the bottle. He stands and steps out of the light. I raise the lamp and watch him do one perfect cartwheel.

I keep holding up the lamp. I feel myself melt into the floor.

He lands light on his feet. He takes a small, swooping bow.

“Imagine,” he says, “that we are just a nation of people with a deep desire to die.”

*   *   *

In our room on the second floor, alone with Marcus, I open the book and read to him: “The sea is everything. It covers seven-tenths of the terrestrial globe. Its breath is pure and healthy. It is an immense desert, where man is never lonely, for he feels life stirring on all sides.”

Terrestrial, I keep thinking, still woozy from the green bottle. The word feels strange inside my brain.

Is the sea still everything to my mother? Is she still pure and healthy?

“Yes,” Marcus says, and I realize I've been speaking aloud.

Marcus has started adding to the drawings on our bedroom wall, only in his drawing there are no people. He uses a pencil he borrowed from Nelson's lab. From the mattress, I watch him sit alongside the wall, like he's in a canoe, and squeeze the pencil tight. Next to the person taking a shit, he is sketching a sailboat. It is empty of passengers and floating on waves shaped like teeth.

I have gotten used to him sleeping next to me, gotten used to the weight and warmth of another body. He smells like a city after a rain. His left foot jerks when he dreams. Sometimes we wake with our legs twisted together or our hands touching, damp and warm, or with his rosy rabbit lips pressed against the back of my neck. Every night we are close, but I am his sister still.

When I'm alone in the Mansion, I find myself standing at the top of the basement steps. I think about the cold and the nets of cobwebs and Darcie filling the eyedropper with a liquid that has no color and no smell. I think about how Cherry Meth sounds like it could be candy and how the Mission Hill girls said there was a stretch of time when it felt glorious, like someone had given them an amazing gift and they were going to dream forever. How can Darcie be convinced? I look at the dark stairs and wonder what it would be possible for me to hear down there, to remember.

*   *   *

I have the dream about me and my mother swimming in the ocean. I smell grass. There is no land, no fear, no limit to how long we can hold our breath—same as before. Only this time my mother swims up behind me and lashes her arm around my chest and hauls me under the water. Suddenly I have limits. Suddenly my air is running out. I twist and I kick. I bite her muscled forearm. I try to get loose, to turn in the water and see her face or what her face has been replaced with. She holds me under until the shadows at the bottom of the sea start rising toward me. I feel the cold on the soles of my feet and when I wake my feet are cold like they've been soaked in ice and I'm breathing fast and in the dark of our room it's Marcus who has lashed his arm around me. He is holding me as tight as my mother did in my dream, only he is saying, “Easy easy,” and I know he isn't trying to sink me but bring me up.

*   *   *

One week it feels like spring outside and our games move into the yard, a race through the woods behind the Mansion, the halo of bare trees the starting point, the creek at the bottom of the slope the finish. We line up in the shadow of the house and Nelson shouts, “Go!” and we all take off. The slush is melting, uncovering the world that has been sleeping beneath, a vast map of root and mud and branch and leaf and weed. Nelson is fast, and for a while he's right beside me, but then something in me shifts and I'm gone. My steps grow longer. I feel my body gaining speed. I bounce through the mud, over fallen logs. I smack against the ferns. I skid downhill. I leave everyone behind.

I don't stop when I hit the creek. I splash through and continue up the bank. At the top of a small rise, I finally stop and turn around. Nelson is sloshing through the creek. In the distance, I can see the pale flicker of Darcie's wings. I wait to see Marcus winding through the trees, wait for the white flash of his mask, but he stays invisible.

Nelson comes up the rise first. He bends over and grabs his knees, gasping.

“You weren't supposed to win,” he says after he gets his breath. His sneakers are slick with mud.

“You should have run faster,” I say back.

I am still looking for Marcus. I forget about Nelson. I stand tall on the rise and make Xs with my arms.

“Where is he?” I ask Darcie as she climbs the rise, struggling under the weight of her wings. She says that she doesn't know, that he was ahead of her and then she lost sight of him. She thought he would be up here by now, waiting with the rest of us.

I stop waving. I pull my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands.

“I'm the slowest.” She holds up her palms. “I can't be held responsible.”

I remember one of the Pathologist's meditations:
A PANICKED HEART IS NOT A WELL HEART.

I try to listen.

We wait for the sound of footsteps moving through the trees. We wait to see a figure crossing the creek, the water spraying silver around his ankles. I pace on the rise. I chew my nails. No one comes.

“Uh-oh,” Darcie says.

I run back into the woods. I weave around the trees like I'm on an obstacle course. I race around the trucks, kicking up leaves. I fall over the roots. Fuck the Pathologist and his meditations, because now the panic is a cold burn in the pit of my stomach and I can feel it poisoning me, making my heart unwell. I reach into bushes. I look behind fallen logs. The land feels emptier than it did before and I have this terrible feeling that I have lost him, that I have lost Marcus, all because I didn't stay with him, all because I decided I wanted to be the fastest, to win, and now he has disappeared into some unfindable place. I say his name and then I call his name and then I scream his name, because my voice has to be loud enough to reach into that unfindable place and pull him out.

The woods are getting darker and I am running wildly and I don't know how I will ever stop with Marcus in that unfindable place until I run right into something solid. The force knocks me onto the cold ground, wind pushed out. I touch my forehead and feel the wet of blood. Two figures are standing over me, watery, like I'm looking through the glass bottom of a boat. Behind them I see a tall tree. I squirm on my back. All language is trapped in my throat. They kneel beside me, one on either side, and touch the blood on my forehead and tell me that the woods will never give me what I want if I don't know how to ask.

Darcie and Nelson take me back to the Mansion. I thought it was the middle of the night, but when I look up I see that the sky is starting to fade into dawn. I don't want to go back to the house, I want to keep looking, but Nelson insists that to find is not an act of will, but an act of submission.

“The trick to finding is to stop looking.” He is leading me by the elbow. His grip is not gentle. I want to shake free, but don't trust myself to walk on my own. The energy in my body wants only to charge through the trees and to scream and to bleed.

“What bullshit,” I say to Nelson. “What absolute bullshit.”