Laura van den Berg - Find Me

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.