Laura van den Berg - Find Me

I don’t stop when I hit the creek. I splash through and continue up the bank. At the top of a small rise, I finally stop and turn around. Nelson is sloshing through the creek. In the distance, I can see the pale flicker of Darcie’s wings. I wait to see Marcus winding through the trees, wait for the white flash of his mask, but he stays invisible.

Nelson comes up the rise first. He bends over and grabs his knees, gasping.

“You weren’t supposed to win,” he says after he gets his breath. His sneakers are slick with mud.

“You should have run faster,” I say back.

I am still looking for Marcus. I forget about Nelson. I stand tall on the rise and make Xs with my arms.

“Where is he?” I ask Darcie as she climbs the rise, struggling under the weight of her wings. She says that she doesn’t know, that he was ahead of her and then she lost sight of him. She thought he would be up here by now, waiting with the rest of us.

I stop waving. I pull my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands.

“I’m the slowest.” She holds up her palms. “I can’t be held responsible.”

I remember one of the Pathologist’s meditations: A PANICKED HEART IS NOT A WELL HEART.

I try to listen.

We wait for the sound of footsteps moving through the trees. We wait to see a figure crossing the creek, the water spraying silver around his ankles. I pace on the rise. I chew my nails. No one comes.

“Uh-oh,” Darcie says.

I run back into the woods. I weave around the trees like I’m on an obstacle course. I race around the trucks, kicking up leaves. I fall over the roots. Fuck the Pathologist and his meditations, because now the panic is a cold burn in the pit of my stomach and I can feel it poisoning me, making my heart unwell. I reach into bushes. I look behind fallen logs. The land feels emptier than it did before and I have this terrible feeling that I have lost him, that I have lost Marcus, all because I didn’t stay with him, all because I decided I wanted to be the fastest, to win, and now he has disappeared into some unfindable place. I say his name and then I call his name and then I scream his name, because my voice has to be loud enough to reach into that unfindable place and pull him out.

The woods are getting darker and I am running wildly and I don’t know how I will ever stop with Marcus in that unfindable place until I run right into something solid. The force knocks me onto the cold ground, wind pushed out. I touch my forehead and feel the wet of blood. Two figures are standing over me, watery, like I’m looking through the glass bottom of a boat. Behind them I see a tall tree. I squirm on my back. All language is trapped in my throat. They kneel beside me, one on either side, and touch the blood on my forehead and tell me that the woods will never give me what I want if I don’t know how to ask.

Darcie and Nelson take me back to the Mansion. I thought it was the middle of the night, but when I look up I see that the sky is starting to fade into dawn. I don’t want to go back to the house, I want to keep looking, but Nelson insists that to find is not an act of will, but an act of submission.

“The trick to finding is to stop looking.” He is leading me by the elbow. His grip is not gentle. I want to shake free, but don’t trust myself to walk on my own. The energy in my body wants only to charge through the trees and to scream and to bleed.

“What bullshit,” I say to Nelson. “What absolute bullshit.”

To be looked for is to matter.

Every girl on every missing persons flyer has mattered more than me.

“Think what you want,” he says, squeezing. The blood on my forehead is drying into a sticky red line.

In the living room, we discover Marcus sitting in front of the fireplace and I feel the burn in my stomach turn hot. He has been right here, in a very findable place! How could he have left me alone in the woods? I get away from Nelson. I stomp my feet and plaster slides down the wall and makes white poofs on the floor, like tiny bombs are detonating.

“What’s the matter with you?” The terror I felt in the woods, how can I even begin to explain that to him. “I thought my fucking heart was going to stop.”

Marcus sits with his shoulders rounded, like a child in time-out. He tilts his head, so I can see the white edge of his mask, and pushes the stuffing around inside his coat.

“I don’t like races,” he says without turning around.

I feel Darcie’s eyes on me. She runs her tongue over her stained front teeth. She smoothes her feathers.

“Maybe the tunnel has something to teach you after all,” she says.

I should be cold in the basement, but after the eyedropper I feel warm inside. I undress in front of Darcie and Marcus, stepping out of my jeans, wrestling out of my sweatshirt. That moment when the sweatshirt comes over my head, the seconds of blindness followed by the return of sight, feels like another kind of passage. I do it all slowly. I want them to see me, to remember.

Darcie watches. She pulls a feather out of her wings and chews the quill. Marcus stares at the doll with the missing arm.

On the road, the weight has fallen away. I’m surprised at how small I am without my clothes, board straight except for the bulges of breast and belly. I pinch my collarbone and the sharp lines of my hips. I feel the veins on my stomach.

The liquid has no aftertaste. It disappears on my tongue. I try to think Cherry Meth and not Grievous Bodily Harm.

Darcie leads me into the tunnel. She closes the door behind me. I start walking. My toes grind into the dirt. In the narrowness of the tunnel, I begin to feel thirsty and dizzy and like I am not still inside a house but wandering into some distant land.

A wave nearly knocks me down. A wave of what , I’m not sure, but it makes me hot and sick. I stop walking. My stomach lurches. I want to get close to the ground and put my head between my knees, but the cold of the dirt drives me away.

What if all of this is wrong? What if we have gotten lost?

I can imagine these questions, but I am in no way equipped to answer them, because my brain is a blue jellyfish that has crawled out through my ear and is hovering somewhere along the roof of the tunnel, happy to finally be free of the body.

“Come back here,” I say to the jellyfish. I snatch at the air above and scrape my knuckles on the top of the tunnel.

Echoes.

Deeper inside, the cold hits. I start to shiver. My teeth clank together. The cut on my forehead pulses. I feel a sharp ache in the bone, like something is trying to burrow into the soft matter. Grit on my heels. I want to turn around, to run back to the door, but it’s like the path behind me has disintegrated and now the only way to go is forward.

I reach the end and touch the stone and the empty place where a stone used to be. The blue jellyfish brain returns for a moment, the tentacles twisting around my hair, before floating away again. I turn and find that the path back is still real and solid and I picture Darcie and Marcus standing behind the steel door, waiting.

I’m halfway there when I hear the voice — faint at first, like the tendrils of language you catch through static on a radio. I stop walking. I listen to the gradual swell of sound. The voice is singing something. It sounds like a nursery rhyme. I make out the words “billy goat” and “ax” and “wooden leg.”

I smell burning rubber. Another waves comes.

I lose all sense of the minute and the hour, become trapped inside some strange pocket of time, like the watchtower with the stopped hands that Marcus saw from a bus window. I try to find the source of the singing, but it’s everywhere, in front and behind and on my skin and in the air and in my plasma. There is no getting away from it and I’m not even sure I want to get away, because maybe this is my mother speaking and maybe I will want to crawl inside this voice and live there forever.