Three Moments of an Explosion (20 page)

It might have been a warning stink she smelled then, it might have been that the water seemed excited. The boat shook as the hidden cat moaned and scrabbled.

“See?” Mel said. “Look. See?”

She looked down. And it was very dark, but even in the night and through the black water she thought she saw a darker thing still rising.

Mel screamed. The cat screamed. She let it go.

With a
plop
like a pebble in a well the lake swallowed the bag and the cat’s noise ended. Bubbles streamed up.

The boat pitched in the quiet. Whimpering with every breath, Mel leaned over a tiny bit and looked down. Strained to see the pale bag descending. But it was too dim or it had fallen too fast, or it was enveloped in mud or something had pulled it down because she saw nothing.

Mel leaves work early. It is nearly spring and the pubs are full. Her new colleagues—the solicitors asked her back and she said no, is now at a small publishing house—invite her for a drink. She smiles and hesitates and joins them, though she doesn’t stay long. They are sweet. Two of her workmates in particular she likes a lot, and one of them has been flirting with her. Mel feels better for their company.

She rowed back weeping, that last night on the water. She was lonely without the cat. She tried not to think about the last moments of its life. Not to think of the last moments of Joanna’s.

The lake and the wind were very still. Nothing buffeted her. Yes, she had thought. Ignore me. Mel tied up the boat and walked back to her car and fell asleep in it right there by the road. She had been afraid to do that, to lose herself in the dark, to sleep behind the wheel as if somehow she might wake with the vehicle careering toward something, but she could not fight her exhaustion.

When she had jerked awake and her heartbeat had slowed, she felt, to her astonishment, better. Dry, headachey in the windscreen-filtered sun, but calmer.

Mostly now she tries not to think about it at all.

Of course that isn’t possible. Sometimes during her therapy sessions, she can’t avoid it. It isn’t therapy, exactly, she reminds herself, it’s grief counselling, for Jo. Sometimes she tells her counselor a little, a very little about what happened. She hints at what she thinks she saw. She does so in code. She is vague, she uses metaphors, so the brusque kind woman can think her client is talking about existential fears.

It gets better and worse and better again. Christmas was hard. She sent a letter to Joanna’s parents and they did not respond. That was cruel, she thinks, that’s really not OK. She spent two days with her father and terrified him by getting drunk and scared and crying a lot. She dreamed of the dark figure, the lost ape remnant on the wood.

But the nightmares ebbed. She still has them sometimes but they’re only dreams. She’d fed the thing a sacrifice.

Mel spends the days at a computer, pushing text around templates. She is quiet, fearful of attention, but a real person, living in the city.

How could she not be changed? But no matter how much, no matter how everything that happened has hollowed her out and done something bad to everything, no matter her loss, it’s hard to live with it every moment. The day after you see something that can’t be unseen you are a salt pillar. Eight weeks after that, you still saw it, it’s still there, but you’re thinking about bus fares and bureaucracy too, you can’t not. Mel can barely believe it but here she is in life again.

She is working, and sometimes now thinking of things other than the lake. Two weeks ago her counselor said something about reckoning and accounting, about facing up to things, something well-meaning and point-missing that still made Mel feel better.

The city is dark and pleasantly cold. Mel buys microwave rice at the shop on the corner. She reads email on her phone as she passes a church and a laundrette and descends to her basement flat. She turns on all the lights and showers to music: her radio is made for bathrooms, it sticks to tiles. She leaves it playing when she’s done.

Mel calls her father, and talks to him while she cooks, over the muffled radio and cars and vans muttering past at head height outside. He chitchats carefully and she listens, and answers his questions. In the middle of their conversation the music from the bathroom gets abruptly louder. There is a thud that makes her wince, then silence. “Ouch,” she says. “No, I’m fine, something broke. Can I call you back?”

The radio has slipped off the wall. It lies broken on the shower’s floor. “Oh fuck it,” Mel says. She bends to pick it up. Her face gets close to the drain. Her throat catches and she steadies herself, her hand down in the cold wet. She smells old rot.

Mel runs.

For an instant the thought comes that there might be a blockage, a problem in the pipes, but she knows that smell, that decay and sluggish lake water. It is not a London smell. And Mel knows as it fills her flat and she runs and tries to breathe and the air grows freezing around her that she has always known she would smell it again. There is nowhere beyond some attentions.

The dimensions of her corridor are wrong. Something is missing. She staggers. Runs into a chair, into the sideboard. There is slime on the wall and floor.

She has locked her front door. Mel makes it to the living room. She finds her bag and scrabbles and her keys aren’t there. She grabs her phone. The rug is wet. Her books on all the shelves on all the walls are muddy. Mel is gasping. “Help me,” she whispers into the phone as she dials emergency, as she hears her signal die in white noise. “Help.”

In the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom, in the hall, the lights go out, one by one. Darkness comes in. There is a darkness between Mel and the city.

Why are you here? she whispers in her head, while she sinks to her knees and the smell comes and the light goes. What do you want?

There are lacks that won’t be filled.

Mel tries to make herself small. Something comes before her. It knows her.

There is the clucking. Hiss. The execution sack streams. It gushes. It’s so much bigger than it was. She fed it and it’s bloated. A glutton. It has eaten more and taken time. The leather sack lurches wetly and protrudes with inside limbs and over her whimpering Mel hears a creak and animal sounds and words and the grind of bones.

Here comes the Säcken, full of new things. She hears cat noises. Here comes the poena cullei, and it wants, it would never not come, and like the stomach it is it will have her, and everything.

Its sutures unravel. The seams are law’s mouths. They open not to let out but to take in. The Säcken opens to feed, to make her poena. And this time there is no Joanna to wake and save her.

Oh, why did she think that?

Why did she think that now? As the rolling sack spurts mud on her and comes closer? Why now as she hears a mess of old voices and new? As a cat barks and a rooster hisses? As the leather strains and the poena looms and reaches and a dog tries to speak and a long-dead woman meows like a cat and a snake makes words and the poena opens and rank water pours out and Mel sees through the shadows what is inside at last and screams and screams and still hears a faint last sound.

Kikeriki, she hears, kikeriki, whispered in a voice she knows.

SYLLABUS

HUMANITY, INTROSPECTION AND DEBRIS

This is a three-week higher-level course. See separate sheet for reading list. Sophisticated engagement with the material is expected. Physical presence at classes is mandatory: Echofigures may not attend in your stead.

Your final mark will be based on a single long-form essay agreed with your AI; OR a three-hour, three-question exam; OR a performative trance.

Week 1: Tip Life

The experiments of Ngosi and Backhouse have proved that, contrary to what had been assumed to be an injunction of ethical chronotourism, history is littered with the trash left by time-travelers. Since that realization, various common items of everyday life have been proven to be such rejectamenta.

We will examine the nature of these proofs, particularly given our timeline’s facility in smoothing over the scars of these discards; the political ramifications of living in a scree of future rubbish; the likelihood that some such garbage is from tourists from the
past,
rather than from the not-yet; and the importance, if any, of the fact that a disproportionate number of items of this repurposed rubbish are now quotidian features of modern streets.

Topics for discussion may include the following:

• Benches: what will they be originally?

• Why were bollards for so long held to be refugees from a future war? Why did this cease to be mainstream opinion?

• Can trees be recuperated?

You will be expected to show all proofs.

Week 2: The Misprision of Modern Relief

The arrival of insect ships to London skies in 1848 initially led to brief interplanetary war, until the 1849 Treaty of Sutton put an end to the conflict, after which relations between the British and visiting authorities thawed rapidly. We will review the history of this famous “Misunderstanding” and its aftermath.

Our focus will be on the period following the inauguration of the first insect bishop in the Church of England (Bishop Insect of Manchester, in 1853) up to and including the present day, and the rapid spread of insects into their current leading positions in humanitarian and ethical organizations. We will examine the life and works of the famous “Insect with the Lamp” among the wounded of Crimea; the strenuous efforts at slum clearance carried out by Insect and Insect in Birmingham during the 1890s; and the rise of the modern telethon and charity single, a sector still insect-dominated.

We will end with a comparison of Insect’s famous 1962 Stockholm declaration that “We will not rest until global suffering has been eradicated” with Eleanor Marx’s excoriating 1890 pamphlet “The Chitin of Charity.”

You will be expected to take sides.

Week 3: Cost-Benefit

In what was called “the last and most awesome frontier,” sickness in general and an increasing number of particular conditions were recently privatized in the UK. Can this be deemed a success? And if so, for whom, how and why?

We will perform a critical reading of the government’s “You Be Illin’!” advertising campaign to publicize the sale of shares. We will ask what correlation, if any, can be drawn between the precipitous rise in the price of shares in plague, the spread of the “Cures are for Pussies” internet meme, and Diesel’s “You-Go Bubo” range of jewelry.

PLEASE NOTE: If you are, in the opinion of your AI, a member of the “Pus-Tool” youth subculture, you may not write on this topic. The AI’s judgment on this issue is final.

DREADED OUTCOME

In the morning I had an empty-chair session with Charles B, so he could talk to his absent father. Generally I try to schedule those for the end of the day—they can be hard, emotionally, for me as well as for the patient—but this time there was no other option.

It was particularly tough because I was tired. I’d worked late the previous night. I’ve been doing that a lot. I’d ended up heading home after midnight, walking a long way past the lights of bars and down dark residential streets in the cold rain. I threw off my jacket, my gloves, and my jeans the moment I came through my apartment door, and showered in very hot water—my showerhead defies New York City’s low-flow rules—before falling into bed. But I was too wired to sleep. I got up again almost immediately. I did a few chin-ups at the bar I installed in my kitchen and, surrendering, I made myself a coffee. I’ve never been a great sleeper, particularly when I’m really focused on a project.

I’d broken a nail on my right index finger. The nude-colored polish was noticeably chipped. I’ll get a manicure as soon as I can. It’s unprofessional to look ragged. In the meantime I filed it down, reapplied varnish, watched the dawn.

The edge was still a little uneven. Sitting in my clinic the next morning I dug it into the ball of my thumb to help myself concentrate. I facilitated Charles’s questions to and answers from his father.

After lunch was Sara W. It was only her second session but things were becoming clear. She’s in her thirties, buckling under a wave of anxiety. She’s not ready to say so yet, but she wants and needs to leave her husband. Not that he’s the cause of her difficulties: those she’s carried from her parents.

After her was Brian G, a gambling addict. Then a short catch-up with Ella P, whom I hadn’t seen for weeks, and who was doing well. I’ll keep her file and I hope she’ll check in from time to time—I take a continuing interest in my patients—but I don’t think she needs me any more.

The last session of the afternoon was with Annalise.

My name is Dana Sackhoff. I’m thirty-eight, and I’m coming up to my ten-year anniversary in this job. I’ve had my own practice all that time, here in Brooklyn.

My clinic’s in Fort Greene. It’s small, quiet and light, with an entrance direct to the practice, which patients prefer. I’ve worked to make the consulting room the right combination of homely but abstract—full of pleasant, forgettable art, warm colors, that kind of thing. There are copies of
Harper’s
and
InStyle
in the waiting room, and some black-and-white photos of Coney Island roller coasters. There’s a light-up pigeon I bought at Brooklyn Flea: I want patients to know that humor is allowed here.

I take just as much care over how I present myself: hip but not hipster, square-rimmed black glasses which I swear I was wearing before they became uniform, hair up, loosely. Not too touchy-feely, not too severe, not sexy, not sisterly. If H & M did a capsule collection like that, they’d clean up in the therapist market. In New York that’s decent market share.

I have two small tattoos, which my patients never see.

I was premed at Yale, but I ended up doing my Masters and PhD in psych theory. I was going to be an academic, even published a couple of papers, but when, out of curiosity, I took a course in therapeutic practice I knew I’d found my métier. I specialize in addiction and compulsion, trauma recovery and attachment disorder.