The Drowned Life (19 page)

“Dorphin's been a painter for years,” I said.

“He's been co-opted by this group. A lot of people with the scribble mind turn out to be artists—painters, musicians, writers—but not all of them. So they either paid Dorphin a huge sum of money or blackmailed him or something to work for them. They gave him the design, no doubt, which it's obvious they now know, and he produced this painting and took it on the road to try to flush us out. Believe me, no one who remembers would go that public with the
Vundesh
. I knew it was a ploy when I saw the catalog and that painting, and I knew Esme would see it too.”

“The
Vundesh
?”

“That's the name of the scribble design.”

“This is completely insane,” I said. “What will they do to Esme?”

“Well, if Dorphin believes she really remembers, she could disappear for good,” he said. “It all depends on if he has the device with him or not.”

“What device?” I asked, but I felt the car stopping. I looked and saw that Farno had pulled up to the curb in front of Esme's building. Another car was parked a few yards in front of the Chevy.

We jumped out and ran up the steps. The moment we were at the door, I reached up and hit the buzzer for her apartment. We waited but there was no answer. I hit it three more times with no response from above.

“Look out,” said Farno, and he gently moved me to the side and scanned the names next to the buzzers. “I think Jenkins from our Life class lives here too.” He must have found his name, because he pressed one of the buzzers and held it down.

Before long, a window opened two stories up and Jenkins stuck his head out. “Who's there?” he said, looking down.

Farno took a step back and looked up. “Hey man, it's me,” he said and waved.

“Yo,” said Jenkins.

“Pat Shay's here with me. We're going up to Esme's place but I think she's got her headphones on or something. Buzz us in, okay?”

I heard the window close, and a few seconds later the door buzzed. I grabbed the handle and Farno and I ran in. The door to the stairs was locked, so we had no choice but to take the elevator. The ascent was excruciatingly slow.

“Let's avoid fisticuffs and heroics,” said Farno. “I want to get through this without anyone getting hurt, especially me.”

When the elevator came to rest at Esme's floor, I pulled back the heavy door, and just as I got a view of her apartment and saw that its door was wide open, I saw someone bolt out of it and head down the short hallway. It could have been Dorphin, but all I saw was a blur. Stepping into the hall, I turned and saw the door to the stairway swing shut and lock. I bounded across the hall and into Esme's place. She was stretched out on the floor in the middle of her apartment, not moving. I dropped down next to her and took her arm to feel for a pulse, but as I groped along her wrist, I realized she was breathing.

“She's alive,” I said over my shoulder.

Together we hoisted her up onto the couch where she'd be more comfortable. Farno went to get her some water, and I sat holding her hand and calling her name.

She eventually came around, shaking her head as if to clear it. When she opened her eyes, she saw me and said in a groggy voice, “Hey, Pat.” A moment passed, and then she suddenly sat straight up and looked around nervously.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Dorphin? He's gone,” I said.

“He put this thing on my head, and then…everything went black.”

Farno walked in with the water then. She looked up at him.

“What are you doing here?” she asked. “What are the two of you doing here?”

She held her head in both hands as we filled her in. “Are you getting this?” I asked.

She nodded.

Farno explained that the device Dorphin had used was something that helps them, whoever they are, to determine if you actually remember. According to him it was something new and it indicated some anomaly in the natural electromagnetic field emanating from the brain that was at the heart of the phenomenon.

“Did he have something like a television remote control?” asked Farno.

Esme nodded. “My god, it zapped me like an electric shock.”

“He probably knows you don't have it, if he used that. That's a good thing,” said Farno. “If he thought you had it, you might not still be here.”

Esme took her hands away from her head and looked up. “Here's what I want to know,” she said. “What is
it
?”

I turned to Farno and said, “Yeah, let's have it. We know too much already.”

He got up, went over, and shut the door to the apartment. On the way back, he pulled up the chair from the computer desk and straddled it, crossing his arms over the back. “Okay,” he said. “It's not like it's gonna change anything for you to know. Just, please, try to keep it a secret from here on out. Can you promise me that?”

Esme and I both agreed.

“There are some people—why these particular people and not others seems completely random—who are born with the ability to remember, after they are born, what it was like in the womb.”

“Dorphin told me it was heaven—blue skies and dead relatives and omniscience, and that his device would allow me to see it,” said Esme.

“Dorphin's an imposter. He's not even close to what the memory is. And, in fact, it's something that I truly can't describe to you. There just aren't words. It makes you different, though. It makes you experience the world differently than people without it. There's no special powers that come with it, no grand insights, but just a calm sense of well-being. All I can tell you is that you feel in your heart that you belong to the universe, that you know you have a purpose. That's it.”

“What about the scribble?” I asked.

“I can make it automatically. I could make it ever since I could hold a crayon; perfect every time. It's a physical manifestation of the phenomenon. I don't understand it, only that it's a sign to others who have it that you also remember. There's something to knowing you're not the only one, and so we communicate this to one another. There's nothing more to it than that. There's no dark conspiracy. We're not out to take over the world or any of that silly shit.”

“If it's so simple,” said Esme, “then why keep it a secret?”

“First off,” said Farno, “there's an understanding that comes with the remembering, sort of built in with it, and that is that it's better to keep it a secret from those who don't experience it. Look at Dorphin and the people he works for—the government; some pharmaceutical company, maybe, wanting to bottle and exploit that sense of purpose I mentioned; perhaps a vigilante group desperate to eradicate our difference from humanity. If you told people, they'd think we were talking about a memory of heaven, or the afterlife, or some realm in the course of reincarnation—start projecting onto it what they wanted it to be and become jealous they'd missed out. They couldn't be further off the mark. Think of how religious fanatics would abuse it. It has nothing to do with God in the pedestrian sense. The anti-abortionists would have a field day with it, never understanding the least bit of what it was.
The truth is, if you have it, you have it, you know, and if you don't, you'll never know.”

I had a thousand more questions, but Farno said he had to leave. “She should probably stay somewhere else for a couple of days just in case they come again,” he said to me. “If by then no one has broken into the apartment, it's probably a good sign that they know she's not authentic. No sense in calling the cops; they're not gonna believe you.” He got up and headed for the door, and I thanked him for helping us. Without looking back, he simply waved his hand in the air. I thought Esme should also have said something to him, but she never opened her mouth. When he was gone, I looked at her and saw she was crying.

She remained silent while I helped her put a few things together and got her into her coat. It was as if she were drugged or drunk or sleepwalking. I told her I was taking her to my place, and I thought she would refuse to go, but she didn't. On the walk to my apartment, I kept my arm around her. She leaned against me, and I could feel her shivering. “Are you all right?” I asked her every couple of blocks, and instead of answering me, she'd put her hand on my side for a moment. The only sign that she was conscious at all was when we got to my apartment and climbed the impossibly long set of steps. I opened the door and flipped on the light switch, and when she saw it, she said, “Beautiful.” I laughed, but she didn't.

She left my side and walked over to where the mattress lay on the floor. Unhitching the back of her dress, she let it drop right there, and wearing only a pair of underpants got into bed and curled into a fetal position beneath the blankets. She closed her eyes, and I turned the lights off so she could sleep. Instead of trying to find a place to sleep, I sat in the dark in front of my easel and had a beer, thinking through what had happened that night. She seemed so different, so beaten. The experience had changed her in some way, flipped a switch inside of her and turned off the manic
energy. I pondered how and why, but it never came clear to me. Finally, I just lay down on the floor at the foot of the mattress and wadded a jacket up for a pillow. The floor was hard as hell, but I was exhausted.

My eyes hadn't been closed five minutes when I heard her voice, whispering. “Pat, come over here with me,” she said. I didn't argue, but got to my knees and crawled over to the empty side of the mattress. Once I was under the covers, she turned to me and said, “Just hold me.” So I did, and that's how we slept all night.

I was late getting up the next morning and had to rush to get ready for school. She was still asleep when I left. All day I wondered how long Esme would stay with me or if she'd be gone when I got home. I saw Farno in class and he completely ignored me. To show him I was true to my promise of secrecy, I also said nothing to him. When class was over, though, and we passed in the hallway, he subtly nodded and smiled at me. I took the first bus I could catch and stopped at the Chinese place up the street from my apartment, buying enough for two.

Esme was still there. She'd done the dishes and straightened the place up a bit—a very welcome sight indeed. Her demeanor was lighter, at least more cognizant. It wasn't that she no longer seemed changed, but at least she was talkative and smiled at the fact that I'd bought us dinner. Instead of my usual, eating right out of the white cartons, we cleared the table and she found a couple of plates I couldn't remember owning. She asked me what had happened at school, and I thanked her for doing the dishes and cleaning. After that, though, things went quiet.

Unable to take the silence, I asked her, “So, did you go out today?”

“No,” she said, “but I'll show you what I did.” She got up and walked over to an old drawing board I had set up by the window. She pointed down at the board.

On one side, taped to the slanted surface, was one of the day-care kids' drawings of the scribble. Lying next to them was a stack of drawing paper, the top sheet of which also had a scribble on it, but not
the
scribble.

“What are you doing?” I asked, smiling.

“I'm trying to draw the scribble freehand.”

“Why?” I asked.

“I thought that if I could get it just right, I'd be able to remember. Sometimes things work in both directions,” she said. Her smile became tenuous.

“Do you think that's a good idea?” I asked.

“It could work,” she told me.

She seemed too fragile for me to try to talk reason to her, as if she'd implode if I called her process into question. Instead, I said, “Well, there's a lot of paper there,” pointing to the five-hundred-sheet box of copier paper I'd ripped off from school that lay on the floor.

She nodded and sat down. Picking up a pencil, she leaned over and grabbed a new sheet of paper from the box. “I'll use both sides,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said and went back to the table to finish my dinner.

She worked relentlessly, attempting to reproduce the scribble. I sat, pretending to paint, and witnessed her mania, trying to decide what to do. Eventually, late into the night, she stood up, took off her clothes, and lay down on the mattress under the blankets.

The next morning when I awoke, she was already at the drawing board. I took a shower and got dressed for school, and when I told her I had to get going, she barely looked up. The sheets of paper holding the rejected scribbles had originally been neatly stacked, but now the stack was spilling onto the floor, and the chair she occupied was surrounded by scattered paper.

“How's it going?” I asked, trying to get a response from her before leaving.

“Good,” she said, holding up her latest attempt. “Look, I'm getting really close.” She laid the picture down next to the one taped to the board. “Don't you think?”

“Yeah,” I said. “You're making progress.” To be honest, it looked to me like she was even further from the mark than when she'd started. I said good-bye, but she was already beginning on her next scribble and didn't acknowledge my leaving.

That evening, when I returned home, I found a blizzard of copier paper covering the floor around the drawing table; the box was empty. The original day-care drawing and the small suitcase she'd packed the night she came to stay were gone and so was she. For the first time since I'd moved in there, the apartment felt empty. I left and ran over to her place. When she didn't answer, I buzzed for Jenkins. A minute later, he was sticking his head out the window above.

“What do you want, Shay?” he called down.

“Have you seen Esme?”

“Yeah,” he said. “A few hours ago. She had a pile of suitcases, right there on the curb. A cab came and got her.”