Lydia Netzer - How to Tell Toledo from the Night Sky

“No, I’m not,” said Irene.

“Get out!” his mother snapped at Irene. Then she shook her head to George. “I’m sorry, baby. I’m sorry.”

“Come on, George,” said Irene. “It’s OK. It’s alright. I’ll figure this out on my own.”

George was distracted. He had a hard time pulling away. He was watching them tipping over the railing, in rows, in columns, the goddesses diving off the balcony again and again, without ever showing a face.

I am dreaming but I am not aware. I am riding on my moped between the Akkad site and my experiment site in the collider, and everything feels smooth. Like there’s nothing but pure air, and there’s nothing but cool breezes, and someone has shifted the visible spectrum five nanometers to blue, and the world down below looks cleaner, and brighter, and I don’t even question why and I don’t know I’m asleep.

If I could figure it out, I would rip the lid off that tunnel and float out of there, and I would go back to Pittsburgh, or to the moon, or somewhere, anywhere but where I am headed. But I don’t know anything so I go on.

I get the first sense of foreboding when the lights go dimmer, and then in my dreaming heart I am aware that I am approaching the same old thing that I fear the most. I see wires broken, the ones that feed the magnets. They’re twisted and blackened and broke. Then the tunnel itself begins to fail around the edges—a tile here, chunk of concrete there—and I am afraid. I see the familiar mess ahead of me, fading in from the blackness, the broken floor, the crashed-in piece of the world. It’s whistling and gaping, but instead of being peripheral to me, and instead of creeping in on the edge of what I see, it is straight ahead, and I am heading toward it, and I can’t stop the moped now, because it’s just going on its own. The center of Dark House is here.

I try to wake myself up. I count my fingers clutching the handlebars: four and six. I shut my eyes and will myself into my mother’s house. My mother’s bathroom. My mother’s basement. On my mother’s porch, sitting on the swing. Somewhere across the world from this, but instead I’m on the moped and I’m flying down the tunnel, kilometer by kilometer, toward the broken floor, the twisted pipe, and my fear is that I will go hurtling into it. I’m so afraid that I turn and bite myself on the shoulder but feel nothing. I smash my face down onto the handlebars and do not feel it. I grab at a broken sheet of metal that has sheared off the tunnel beside me, and it slices through my hand but leaves no mark and I feel nothing.

Then I see her, standing in front of me: tall and sure. George’s mother is here. She puts out her hand, and my vehicle stops. She’s suddenly so familiar, but I remember seeing her with long hair and a happy face. I remember her from when I was a little girl, before the fire. I remember her hugging my mother. I shake my head back and forth, and everything gets clearer. I have never been able to remember anything that happened before the fire. I have always assumed that what happened before the fire was too bad to even remember. I don’t mind forgetting bad things, but here she is—part of this thing that I forgot.

Now I am really aware that I am in Dark House. I am standing in a bedroom. My rocking horse is there, charred just enough to remind my mother of the fire, but still able to rock.

“I had to come and see you,” Sally thunders, towering over me. “There are things you should know that I can’t tell you in front of George.”

“What things?” I ask.

“We thought it was a good idea!” she yells.

“Who?”

“Me! And Bernice!” she says. “And it was a good idea. It would have been good for both of you. But she fucked it up. She fucked everything up.”

“My mother? My mother? Where is she?”

“We made you for each other,” she says. “You and George. Everything, everything, everything was made for you and him. We gave birth to you, together. We planned for you to be together.”

“But I don’t know him. I don’t remember. What happened?”

“We were best friends, do you get it? We wanted our kids to be in love, and safe, and for it to be easy. So we made you, together.”

“And you thought that would work?”

“You were never supposed to know! You were supposed to grow up, meet, and fall in love. It would be easy, after everything we had done to make you perfect for each other. We had a plan, but your mother fell apart,” she says.

It was easy. I fell in love with George as easily as anything that has ever happened to anyone.

“What did you do to my mother?” I ask.

She comes toward me, and she almost looks like she wants to be sweet.

“I didn’t do anything to her but help her, and you too. Don’t you understand?” she says. “I loved you, Irene, from the moment I saw you. And I always meant to keep loving you. But because she made such terrible mistakes—I had to throw you away instead.”

“What are you talking about?”

“She lost her mind. She burned down your house! She was a—drunk!”

“I know that,” I say.

“You are damaged. I made a mistake! You are made from a drunk and a—loser. That is your makeup. It’s unfortunate, but it is real. George is not for you.”

“I’m dreaming,” I say. “You can’t be here.”

“I know it’s hard,” she says. “But you can always say that you are not to blame.”

“Who came first, me or George?” I want to know. It seems important.

“You were born together.” Sally reminds me impatiently.

“Who. Got. Pregnant. First.” Because I know what I mean.

“I did,” Sally snaps. “And then we got her pregnant. Together. With you.”

“What did you do to me? What did you do to her?”

“Don’t you know who your father is?” she says to me. The world around her ripples, as if I am already underwater and sinking toward the bottom of some cold bay. But I concentrate to listen, because this is important. “I’ll tell you now. I know she never would. It’s Uncle Ray. It’s George’s ‘Uncle Ray’—no, he’s not my brother or Dean’s brother. That man who shot himself playing roulette? That’s your father.”

“That’s not true!” I say.

“I chose him for three reasons,” she goes on. She puts up three fingers, and I count them: one, two, three, four. “One, he was available. Two, he was willing to turn his back on you and never look back. Three, he was born in June. There. Your father. The composition of you. I made you for George out of him and her, and I planned it for you to be perfect. But then she turned out so, so bad. It’s not your fault, Irene. You came from two bad things. What could you do? What could you do to help yourself? There is badness inside you. I thought that your mother was good. But she wasn’t.”

I’m fighting off images and skips in what I see: I see my life before the fire.

I see warm-weather picnics, and cold-weather mittens in a blue basket, and I see my rocking horse standing in a different room, a room with trees outside. It is the room in George’s cottage, where I have slept with George. I see two high chairs together, and I know I usually sit in one of those chairs. I see pancakes on a platter, and two mothers cooking in the kitchen. I think very hard, and I see George, and I see George’s mother, and she’s smiling at me so kindly, so encouragingly, and I want her to love me. I do not want to disappoint her. But I know that I have.

“When I put you in her, I didn’t know she was a drunk!” she is saying. “I didn’t know she was a liar! I thought it would be different. But I’m sorry, but you can’t have him now. I cannot let that happen.”

“It’s all fake?” I say. “Our love? It was all a trick? All a scheme?”