The Brink (8 page)

“It's me, Leah. It's Mom,” your mother said. “I want to talk to you.”

“We have affairs to attend to,” Bo said + started to close the door, even though all we had to do was more brain exercises. But your mother wedged her sneaker at the base of the door.

“I don't know who you are, or what this is about, but you can't hold her here,” she said.

Bo turned to you. Everybody in the foyer cleared a path between you + him. “Leah, do you want to go with this human?” he asked.

I wondered if you would be strong enough to shed your feeling, right there in front of us. I wondered if I would be strong enough. But we have to let go + release even the best human memories. Like your mother. Like you + me, after the burgers. Remember how we walked up the ramp of the visitors' center in Salt Lake to the planetarium the Mormons painted there? We sat on the benches + peered up at the planets + you said, “I feel like an alien on earth, Do you ever feel like an alien?” So I explained about our vessels, how our souls drove them like cars until they were jalopies + how Bo would open the Gate for our souls to go weightless + level up. You'd heard so many explanations in your life you were skeptical. But your backpack was heavy, so heavy + confusing, wasn't it? The next morning, you showed up for our meeting in the hotel conference room. Then you went to that phone booth + looked up the name we told you + wrote down the place Darwin had written in the margin + came the next morning, to a field outside of town, where our van idled. You said, “I want to walk through the door of my life.” Bo said, “This way.”

But you came with Rocket on a leash. You had to leave him.

He chased the van until we got on the highway. You wept so much your facepart looked wet.

See, Leah, I do it too. Human love is remembering + remembering is the weight that will keep us here, on this dying planet.

In the foyer, I watched you shake your head no. Suddenly,
I felt warm in my chest, the way gas in the universe collapses together + forms a hot star out of nothing.

Your mother broke down. She shot exhaust from her mouthpart. Then she dropped the cake on the front step. Bo closed the door + turned the lock + I could hear her crying when we began to clap.

Leah,

Can I tell you something? When I was seventeen, I thought maybe I was Jesus. I created my own religion where the saints were the animals of my block. I believed the clouds of feeding sparrows were the face of God. I composed psalms for the squirrels on my clarinet. At this time, I slept in the basement of my father's house, a house in a neighborhood of bullies, + one night a gray tomcat came to my window. His emerald eyes transfixed me. I let him crawl into bed, where he worked the blankets on top of me + curled into sleep, his purr a throaty rumble. This was my holy visitation.

During school, a new Bible wrote itself in the close-ruled pages of my notebook.

Then one night, I found the tomcat at my window, dazed + bloody, one ear blown away to pink tissue. Bits of a firecracker's red paper wrapper lay matted in his fur. He pressed against the window screen but refused to come in, refused to let me touch him. He had come to me to die. Have you ever watched something surrender its vessel, Leah? I vigiled for two days with water + food that this tomcat didn't eat until, finally, his brilliant eyes shallowed + I was inconsolable, just
like you were with Rocket. I saw that our skin is an envelope, ready to be opened. My father thought I'd lost my mind. He called my mother in Phoenix for help. She asked to speak to me. “I have died for the smallest things,” I told her. “Put your father back on the phone,” she said.

I knew that the next time I found God, I would go with him when he ascended.

I told myself I would not feel anything today + then your mother came + now I feel again. All these possible worlds—every place, every person, is a planet, charging with life.

Leah,

It was midnight + tomb-time when I heard your steps outside. I rose from my bunk, peeled a corner of tinfoil from the laundry room window + saw you, at the end of the concrete path, past the tennis court + the dumpster, at the edge of the pool. I thought you were about to dive in, all dressed. But you stood still while the lights from under water—Bo liked to keep the pool lights on as a beacon for the ship—skittered across your body.

Why were you alone, without a check partner? I thought about Bo's counsel on the white board—“Major Offenses: Having likes + dislikes, Trusting your own judgment, Using your own mind” + I knew I had to rescue you from your thoughts. Which itself was also a thought but the right kind. I lifted the window + slid myself through it + snuck out to you because I wanted to know your secret. I wanted to be the one to hear it. I wanted to tell one too.

The bougainvillea flowers supernova'd into pink + red along the path. A warm wind brushed the palms. I came beside you + said, “What is it, Leah? What's wrong?” There are no mirrors in the house, but if there were mirrors you would be able to see how tired your eye machines were.

You said, “When you look up, what do you see, Michael?”

The clouds were gone + left a litter of stars. I was surprised that at night I still couldn't make out the ship or the comet, but Bo always reminded us that human eyes were foreign + cheaply made. I cranked my head back + laced your fingers with my fingers. It was wonderful + bad + strange since I had not touched someone else's skin for three years, since I joined up. Your container was so revved, like the hood of the van after one of our thousand-mile drives.

“I see our last night on earth,” I said.

I had no thoughts when I kissed you except: I am not thinking, finally I am not thinking. I crashed through your atmosphere + landed in a place I already loved.

“What are you doing?” you said + pulled away. As you did, I could see Bo at the back door. His facepart was hard + cold under the door light, the way my father looked at me when he saw the tomcat dead at my window. Bo's gravity pulled us to him. Air pumped through his nostrils as if he'd come from a jog. His scalp was newly shaved but scored with nicks.

“Go immediately to your rooms,” Bo said. “I will be there promptly.”

What I didn't get to tell you: Leah, your mother wrote you letters too. Last year, when we lived in the earth-ship
made of dirt + Coke cans in New Mexico, her letters came every month to our P.O. box + it was my job to check the mail. “Christmas this year was lonely without you,” she wrote. “Daddy and I miss you and love you and hope you are well, sweetheart. Please come home.” There were dozens of these letters, at holidays + birthdays + I learned so much about you. They were even how I came to write these letters to you now. Once, there was even one all the way from Brazil, from your brother. I got them + read them + I threw them away.

Leah,

Bo almost found my letters to you tonight! He came in + told me that the earth gravity has addicted me to human behavior + that he wasn't sure that I would make the window any longer. He searched my entire room—under the mattress, my dresser, even inside my suitcase for tomorrow. (But not in the lint filter of the dryer!) He knew I was hiding something somewhere + that I was having my own thoughts. Then he sat beside me + put his hand on my thigh + squeezed + said that I would have to work as dispatcher tomorrow, which is like doing the dishes except with people's containers. I wouldn't get to see you at all.

I am still so nervous. I felt like I was about to shed in front of him. He just left. Right after, I took out my tuning fork from my pocket + consulted the Next Level but there was no broadcast. I spent some time practicing my telepathy with you, except you don't seem to want to transmit. I'll leave you alone.

Leah,

I'm writing you from the nursery, in the dark, because I don't have much time. This whole morning I have been running around the house like a crazy vessel. Helping fifteen people shed is not easy. Brian is supposed to be the captain but all he did was give me the plastic bags + tell me that I needed to make sure each person had eaten their medicine + shed their container entirely before going on to the next person. But that's hard because I'm distracted by you not being home + because some of the containers backfire + puke a little when they shed.

Old Margaret told me that you went with your new check partner Ladonna to get more applesauce (people had been snacking!). But you're still not home yet. It's almost noon. Where are you? Reading the greeting cards like you loved to do? Watering the plants in some parking lot?

I'm sitting here in the nursery because it was your room, because it is where babies were + they are weightless. I remember once we sat on the floor + you showed me your suitcase. It was covered in glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars. You had packed it with everything you wanted to take with you on the space jump: T-shirts + books + gum.

In the bunks around me, the four containers lay still, Thomas + David + Claire + Julie, because I already did this room. I figure they are at the ionosphere, maybe further. Their suitcases are next to me on the floor. Through the wall, I can hear Bo doing his testimony for the camera, the final one. “It is time to level up,” he says. “The end of the age is upon us.” I
still have the fifteen plastic bags in my hand from the first departures. They have condensation inside them because breath becomes water when you shed inside them. I have to take them to the dumpster—Bo does not want us to recycle.

Writing this, I wonder how long the window in the sky will stay open + if we can still hold each other even if we cross through at different times or if that is just me being stupid. When I lived in Boulder, resurrecting computers, I felt I had no windows. Now there are many + they are open. Still, Bo says it is possible to miss our rendezvous + then we drift in the vacuum, like space trash. I have to stop now, somebody's knocking—

Leah,

I screwed up.

Brian came to the nursery. He had a whole bunch of messed up towels in his hand. He said he'd been cleaning up after me. “Why?” I asked.

“Just go upstairs,” he said.

Bo + Old Margaret were clustered around the bunk in the guest bedroom. I knew I was in trouble. Darwin was stretched out, streamlined for his XXL container: hands at his side, Nike swoosh on his feet for velocity. Darwin was one of Bo's favorites. He had been with Bo for two decades. He even had his testicles erased in Mexico, like Bo had done, because of the drag. “Some students have chosen to have their vehicles neutered,” Darwin once told the camera. “I can't tell you how much lighter it has made me feel.”

Then Bo pointed to Darwin's chest. It rose + fell, rose + fell, a bad bellows. I must have taken the plastic bag off too soon, before Darwin was done shedding. Bo + Old Margaret stepped away + I knew my responsibility as dispatcher. I pressed my hand to his mouth + pinched his nose + stared at his chest to make it stop. But we all knew that I had banged his timing. Darwin is space trash now.

I felt sick to my stomach. I thought the insides of my container were going to come out my mouthpart. But Bo put his hand on the back of my neck. He said, “Don't take on his weight, Michael.” All of the sudden, I remembered why I need Bo. Because Bo doesn't let any weight hold him to the earth at all.

Leah,

This is my last letter. I have to write it in my head because you're not back + I don't know how to find you. We're ready for the last group to make the space jump. That means me + you. Brian has bowls of pudding + applesauce along with baggies of Bo's powder. Plastic cups of the vodka we bought checker the kitchen table. I choose the applesauce because I think it will get you back faster. Old Margaret gives me a piece of paper that she printed with the Routine: “Eat two teaspoons to make room for the powder and stir. Then drink.”

“Wait,” Brian says. “Shouldn't we wait for Leah?”

Your name is a comet streaking.

Bo shakes his head. He'll be left behind to take care of
you, but that's not good enough. I want to be with you when we go. You are my gravity, Leah. The only way I can go is to follow you.

Everyone empties out of the kitchen in silence. We go to our rooms to eat our powder + drink their vodka + shed. My job as dispatcher is over. Bo remains in the room, gauging me. He knows how much waiting I'm capable of.

He blinks his eyes catlike + slow, the whole of understanding inside him. “It's time,” he says.

I go mechanically, so without you, to the laundry room, to my bunk. The washer thumps with a full load. But I see that you've left me something! It's your suitcase next to the bed! I feel so happy. Even if you aren't here yet, I know that you will be with me, on the bunk above.

I set my applesauce + powder down. I go to the dryer to collect my letters to you. I wrap them in a shoelace + then I open your valise to sneak them into your belongings.

But your suitcase is empty, except for a page ripped from the Upanishads, something you could spare. “I'm not coming back, Michael,” it says. “There is nothing in the sky.”

Bo says that when a star explodes, it leaves behind the darkest energy in the universe. My eyes leak, the last of what's inside me. This is what it took to get me to zero.

Bo is at the door. He spoons my dose into my mouth. I don't stop him. The applesauce tastes bitter + gritty, like ashes in mud. Bo pushes me flat, so I rest, his hand brushing my cheekpart. Then, I hear the hum, soft at first but soon it is in my jaw, like my head is pressed against the generator of the
ship rending space. Leah, vanisher, you will never know this. When you look up, you will not see us, not the comet only the tail. Not the thing only the going. Then the hum shatters my container, the hum is the blood in my ears + it slows + slows + now Bo with a plastic bag in his

The bag looked all wrong, tucked against the wall of the basement near the root cellar, glistening under the bare bulb.

Graham knew he hadn't put the bag here, and Graham was the only one in the family who put anything down here. The place was a warehouse of his unfinished business, the tool table an open grave: lobotomized light switches, hopelessly knotted crowns of Christmas lights, the radial saw whose cord—the fucking brain stem!—he'd chewed through on the first go.

His wife, Marlena, would venture down into the basement only under duress, in desperate sorties, with a broom in hand to mash spiders. In fact, they now had a special broom just for mashing spiders, the tiny berries of their carcasses poleaxed on the straw. (It lived, unspeakable, at the bottom of the stairs.) Their sixteen year-old daughter, Emma, deemed the basement “sketchy” and also “rapey” and refused to come down. There was a lot of refusing left in her, Graham was learning. So the
basement was his alone, to clutter and abandon and befoul. But then, here was this black contractor bag that he had all of nothing to do with.

Graham set down the space heater he'd come for, feeling put-upon. He'd taken a personal day for a morning of triage. They were selling in the spring, if they could get a buyer. If the market didn't shit itself again, if he could get this basement cleaned and maybe paneled and deem it a room. He'd work until Em came home for lunch—most days, she bolted from school, what she once called “the hellscape.” They would have a wary, silent lunch together like strangers at a cafeteria, Em's head down, not making eye contact, eating a grilled cheese he'd make for her, and scrolling her phone for a drip of validation.

His attention went to the open window. He remembered Marlena saying that she'd opened them to “let the must out,”
must
being whatever made their clothes smell ripe and subterranean, though Graham believed (it wasn't worth the argument) that the open windows let the must
in
, that the must was inside the house, a part of it now, generations of sweat on the wood. But they were selling soon. It would be someone else's must.

Marlena had found three grassy, charmed acres at Five Mile, outside Grand Rapids, where they'd build. It was their dream, their best-case scenario. They were on the verge of themselves. They had Emma young, and Emma had been hard. First night terrors, then quaking shyness, and most recently weeklong silences to punish them for their interest
in her life. She treated Graham like he was a parole officer, sensing judgment in her every move, and offered glimpses of her personality only when she wanted special dispensations. She had one friend, a redhead named Helena who said nothing to them, ever, a statue with freckles whose parents were divorcing and left her needy, and together they could vanish into black holes of time. At last, though, Em had come into a boy period, and what self-immolating energy that consumed her now found direction. Already, two different boys with inky hair and piercings had come to the door for her, and the horizon of her departure from their daily lives was in view. Graham and Marlena had spoken to an architect, even rolled that appointment into drinks for the two of them. The silhouette in Graham's mind: a wood-timbered ranch with a raked slate roof, floor-to-ceiling windows on the side facing the grasses, obscene amounts of light . . . He would tell Josh and Delia at work that after two decades ferrying copy and deliberating offsets, he'd get to know every joist and stud in the house personally. His hands would finally get dirty.

Graham's attention circled back to the bag. Someone fleeing the police had thrown it through the window, he decided. There were drugs inside it—he imagined a Tide-like mound of cocaine. The neighborhood had tipped, hadn't it? A few weeks ago, a rental property up the street had its porch set on fire. Their next-door neighbor, a young plumber named Aaron, had just adopted a German shepherd “for protection,” an animal now digging holes under their shared fence and barking
neurotically at squirrels. Graham and Marlena moved in when Em was just two, when the area was up and coming. But it never quite came. An alarm company had come through and he'd noticed their neighbors all had the signs jabbed into their front flower beds. Every window, every door, wired. Marlena had refused. “I don't want to live in a terrified world,” she'd said.

But the window, Graham saw, was intact, the screen in place. So the bag had been placed there from inside.

Graham picked it up. Something inside was dense and jointed and uncocaine-like. He set it on the tool table, and undid a knot in the plastic. A fetid smell gusted out, enough to make him recoil.

Later, that dark bloom of plastic, opening in his hands, was what he could not stop thinking of: the moment
before
, when he had the choice to stop, to tie it up and fling it into the trash, and never see the corpse. Inside the bag, the baby was facing down, almost deferentially, its back to him. It was a mercy to have not seen its face. The skin was still speckled with birth. Graham would remember the ashen color and the scale of it, six months along, too small to be full-term, for the rest of his godforsaken life.

He walked over to the slop sink and heaved. His hands closed the bag, shaking convulsively, and cinched it with a contractor tie. His thoughts spiraled into thinking about Em, this stranger who was his daughter. How could they have missed the months of her showing or the sickness—Marlena had been bedridden for months with her—or the advances of one of her pierced suitors, these friends with benefits?

Graham couldn't leave the bag on the table, or the basement floor. He didn't want it to touch anything in the house, to deposit a residue of itself on their lives. He gathered himself, by some ancient instinct, and walked out into the backyard.

The air was frigid, biting, even at noon. He could see the top of their neighbor's white plumbing van over the fence. Graham stepped into the shadow of his garage, out of view, and laid the bag softly (how else?) on the hard-packed ground. It seemed vital to get the bag in the ground before Graham thought too hard or too much. He needed a shovel. If he dug deep and quick, the fact of it wouldn't take hold. Before Em, back when Graham and Marlena traveled the country—they were hoboes for a couple of years there—they had a running joke: when things got bad, when they'd left some shameful evidence of themselves somewhere, he would rush into the car and say, “
Go
,
go
,
go!
” like a getaway, like the end of a heist, because you recalled a place less the faster you left it.

He left the bag and stepped into the garage. The wall had one empty spot for the shovel, next to the rake and the broken rake and the pitchfork that was a prop in some life he would never live. Then Graham remembered Aaron at his back door over the weekend, his presidential face, dressed in a thermal shirt and grimy jeans, shovel pieces in his hands. He said his shovel had snapped when he'd tried to attack a tree root. So he'd come through the door in the fence between their yards—installed by their prior neighbors, who imagined
a community on the block and then promptly relocated to Houston—to ask to borrow theirs. Facing him on the back stairs, Aaron peeked around behind Graham, at the kitchen interior, and said, “Hey, Emma,” and Emma, at the island, smiled, and Graham wondered which men earned her attention and which her dismissal. In the yard, Aaron's German shepherd, improbably named Schatzi, ran around, sniffing, pissing on the sapling Marlena had planted. Graham recalled the swell of masculine provisioning he felt escorting him to the garage, where he handed over his own shovel. Keep it as long as you need it, Graham said, while Aaron surveyed his wall of tools, his whole garage, as though he might find another tool he wanted.

Graham noticed a trowel in an empty flowerpot. It had a sparkly red handle. Marlena had bought it for Em, her
very own trowel
, to encourage gardening, though Em preferred to do anything but. Now that he thought about it, where had Em
been
yesterday? Or the day before? Graham's thinking hit the wall of her routine: school, dinner on the couch, then up in her bedroom, earphones in, computer on and trilling. When did she look up long enough to
get
pregnant? God, he barely knew her.

He took the trowel grimly, knowing a bad decision the instant he gripped the handle.

He chose a spot near the pine tree, screened by the fence from the rear alley. The ground was dense and dry—Graham had to jab with two hands. The dirt made a pitiful pile until he reached sand a few inches down. He could hear the shepherd
next door snorting in Aaron's yard, pacing the fence line. Don't bark, Graham willed. Don't.

He'd done this once before. One summer in high school, he buried the family cat, a beloved throw pillow named Moe that had never quite understood that the road outside the house was a goddamn killing field. He buried her in the ground and surprised himself weeping inconsolably at the graveside, kneeling against his mother's leg and discovering it was sweet and perfumed and cluttered the grief. The next summer, their neighbor set a fence and drove a backhoe into the ground right through the plot. That would not happen here.

Finally, a hole opened up. Deep enough, he thought. Graham set the bag in the hole and tucked the extra plastic in. It occurred to him that inside the plastic, nothing would rot. Generations on, you could dig this thing up and know just what was inside. He got the pitchfork from the garage and jabbed into the bag. The tines struck soft matter and he willed himself to think no further. Then he kicked dirt on top and tamped with his foot, delicately. He promised himself he would never tell anyone where this was. This was the absolute final time he would allow his eyes to fall on this spot. He was murmuring a half-remembered prayer when his cell rang inside the house.

It was Marlena, at the library. He found himself at the counter, phone in hand, unable to answer. If he moved, if he answered and so much as spoke the events of the last fifteen minutes aloud, a crack would spider its way through their
entire lives. No one could know. If he called the police, Emma would go to jail, or he would. That is what happened in an area like this, where the pro-life ads on billboards—fetuses, forty feet tall!—promised good lives and loving parents to every single baby if you would just allow them into the world.

He let the air run out of his lungs. The phone went silent, and in the silence, he discovered he needed Marlena to know. She would know which lawyers to call, how to sit Em down and not destroy her. She worked at the branch library. She could parry anything.

She picked up at the first ring.

“I found something,” Graham said. “In the basement.”

Marlena sighed. “Did the sewer explode again? Because we're staying at a hotel this time.”

“No, it's not the sewer. You need to come home right now.”

“Tell me what's going on.”

He looked out through the kitchen window. A strange shape moved out by the pine tree. Dirt kicked up in the air. He saw the shepherd's black muzzle nose the grave.

“Get home,” Graham managed to say before he hung up.

As soon as the screen door slammed behind him, the dog turned and gripped the ground. A low growl escaped from its tawny throat and then a single bark ripped through the air. Graham froze, empty-handed. Schatzi's black eyes did not waver.

He could see the trench at the far end of the fence where it had, finally, dug underneath. He had to get the dog back on other side, either through the door or the gap it had made.
Aaron would hear the barking and come. He had to undo time. Graham stepped backward and his hand fell on the stem of the pitchfork, resting on the back banister.

At the grave, he could see the black plastic shredded already. He had been wrong—he could never hide or forget the fact of the burial. It was a sinister molecule in the universe, pulling things toward it, like his family, his future, like his right foot, moving one step forward, which shattered some invisible perimeter around the dog, and it dove forward and snarled.

Graham held the pitchfork out. Schatzi snapped and backed up. Graham went to the door in the fence and flipped the latch. It swung open and the dog's ears pricked up, quizzically. Now, Graham edged in wide circle to the opposite flank.

“Come on, come on,” Graham said, trying to settle him, making eye contact.

Schatzi rotated with him. Graham's two hands held the pitchfork out, his only defense. When he took a step toward the hole, the dog lunged. Impulsively, Graham thrust. The tines of the pitchfork jabbed once, into the dog's fur. Schatzi yelped and reeled away toward the fence, where Aaron stood in the opening, mouth agape.

“Jesus Christ,” Aaron said, leaning over to grip Schatzi's collar. His hand came away smeared with blood. “What the fuck?”

The screen door to the house slammed. Graham felt a wave of relief. Marlena was here. Marlena would know which lawyers, everything.

But it was his daughter, Em's face contorted in horror, and
redheaded Helena, Aaron too, these witnesses, every one of them seeing him and the pitchfork and the gray limbs exposed to the air. Graham could not move.

“Everyone, please, go back inside,” Graham said.

Then, in a kind of trance, Helena stepped down the stairs. She wore tight, ripped jeans and a sweater that looked collapsed. Her face had spots where she picked at it. She walked straight past Graham and fell to her knees at the side of the grave, the black plastic visible. The German shepard barked and tested Aaron's grip.

“What did you do?” Aaron said, staring into the hole.

Helena looked at him, bitterness etched in her face, Aaron's face went slack in recognition, and she began to rake the earth into the hole with her hands. Graham dropped the pitchfork and led Em inside,
Come with me
, where they looked at each other across the kitchen island, both of them shaking, trying not to hear the low voices outside. His daughter's eyes were imploring, terrified, and he realized he had grown accustomed to not seeing them, not knowing her. Em tucked her hands into the sleeves and he told her to tell him what she knew, what had happened in the basement, and then they would bury the details and, together, never say another word.