Alix Ohlin - Babylon and Other Stories

“That's the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard,” he said.

“She was in therapy for years,” Mrs. Henglund said. “I thought it was over.”

When she stopped talking the world was soundless. He looked over her shoulder at the clear glass wall of his office. In the corridor people were strolling past, papers in hand, chatting. None of it was possible.

“I thought you should know,” Barbara Henglund said, then stood up and turned to go.

“I don't believe you,” he said.

She looked at him, pity distending her lips into an expression that was almost, but not quite, a smile. “Dustin, Rawlings & Livermore,” she said. “Forty-seventh Street.”

At five o'clock that afternoon he was waiting outside the building. It really was only ten blocks away. He told himself this was crazy, that he'd go home and never tell her about the vicious lies told by her crazy mother, that they'd sever all contact with her family and never go to Babylon again. Crowds of office workers streamed past toward the subway. The day was rainy and gray.

Then he saw her unmistakable blond hair. As if in a dream he reached out and grabbed her arm. In movies, he thought, a guy searches for the girl he loves in a crowd, runs after her, and when she turns around it's never really her.

But Astrid turned around. “What are you doing here?” she said.

He looked at her. “What is this? What are you doing here? What are you?”

Her expression didn't change. “How funny to run into you,” she said. “I was just doing an errand.”

He dragged her to a nearby bench, people on the sidewalk frowning at them, wondering if they ought to intervene. “Love,” he said, “your mother came to see me. She says you work here as a paralegal, that you're from Babylon, not California. Just tell me she's crazy, okay? Tell me who the guy was that you went with to Brian and Marcy's wedding.”

Astrid was wearing gray trousers, and when she crossed her legs on the bench she looked, for a moment, as composed as ever. Then her eyes met his, and he saw the tears and knew his life was over. “I used to like to go to weddings,” she said. “I was … lonely. There are weddings every Saturday at that hall.”

He put his head in his hands, felt her arm wrap around his shoulder, then stood up and shook off her touch, feeling like he was choking. Her hair was in the corner of his sight as he walked away, not knowing where he was going.

It turned out everything was a lie. Her job, her background, even her name — which was Sophia, though she preferred to call herself Astrid after a favorite aunt. That evening in her apartment, relentlessly questioning her, he stripped away lie after lie, and Astrid, sitting on the couch where she'd first lied to him about the dinner she hadn't cooked, admitted to all of them, tears always trembling in her eyes without ever seeming to fall: yes, she'd lied about her job; no, she couldn't explain why. There were lies upon lies, lies without sense, lies without end. There was no reason why being a physician's assistant was better, worth lying about, than being a paralegal. There was no reason why California was preferable to Babylon. He kept asking her what the point was, and she kept shrugging. He grabbed the model of the breast from her bookcase and shook it at her, its rubbery flesh cold in his hand. “What about this?”

“I can't explain it,” she said.

For the first time in months he slept in his own apartment. In the morning — from work, where he was calmer — he called his parents. His mother made arrangements to fly in immediately from Chicago, and when she arrived she set about canceling all the plans that had been made for the wedding. He didn't call Astrid and didn't hear from her. He thought she must be too ashamed, and that she deserved it, for the magnitude of her be trayal.

It was over.

A week went by. His mother called everybody who'd been invited and explained that the wedding was off. He worked all day, and at night his mother gave him some Valium, which he took obediently, just as he'd taken antibiotics from her as a child, and he'd be asleep before eight.

Then one evening he came home and his mother told him she thought he needed help. She'd made an appointment with a therapist for the next morning, without asking, and he was too tired, or sedated, or will-less, to protest. In the office he explained what had happened mechanically, as if it were somebody else's story. The therapist, a scholarly looking man in a green cardigan, listened to him and nodded slowly. “Recovering from this shock will take you some time,” he said.

“Thanks for the tip,” Robert said sharply. The therapist nodded again, and Robert sighed and rubbed his forehead, where there seemed to be a permanent pain. “What gets me is why. Why would she make these things up? They were such useless lies.”

“Often this kind of behavior is related to a childhood trauma or abuse,” the therapist said. “Although of course I can't say for sure, not without seeing her myself.”

Abuse. Into Robert's mind came the vision of Dr. Henglund, the podiatrist, the coldest man in the world. He'd sensed evil in him as soon as they had met. He thought of Astrid fingering the rubber breast, pocketing the speculum that probed the female body. How far they go into the body, how much they know, she'd said. It was the invasion she found fascinating, Robert thought, a vulnerability of the body that must have spoken to her of her own.

He thanked the therapist and, that afternoon, drove out to Long Island, to Henglund's office.

On the wall in the waiting room was a poster showing crippled and deformed feet, hammer-toed, misshapen, archless. On the opposite wall, another poster displayed happy feet, unconfined and lacking bunions, romping in a field as if they'd never once needed shoes. He ignored the nurse and walked right into the examining room, where Henglund was crouched before a woman's foot, holding it like a prince with a slipper. Seeing Robert, he straightened up and excused himself to the patient, a middle-aged woman with red lipstick and enormous hair, then led him into an office and sat down behind the desk.

“Astrid is home with us now,” he said solemnly, leaning forward with his hands clasped, his flesh sallow against his white coat. “We are taking care of her.” His air of menace was even stronger now.

“I can't prove it,” Robert said, “but I believe this is all your fault.”

“Indeed,” Dr. Henglund said. “Your response is understandable, I suppose. One always looks for others to blame when confronted with a difficult situation.”

“Fuck you,” Robert said. “What did you do to her?”

Henglund raised one white eyebrow behind his glasses. His eyes were blue and eerily pale. “This is no longer your concern,” he said.

“If she stays with you, it's the end of her,” Robert said. “You made her what she is.”

Henglund touched the tips of his long fingers together. “It's been my experience,” he said, “that we make ourselves.”

Robert left the office in disgust and drove to the Henglunds' house, parked on the street, and walked up the driveway. Through the front window he could see Astrid sitting on the living-room couch reading The New York Times. Her expression was calm. When she lifted her head, he thought she'd heard his approach; but then she said something in the direction of the kitchen, and he knew she must be talking to her mother. As he watched her he felt himself disintegrating, dissolving. He understood then why people with broken hearts killed themselves. It wasn't the pain so much as the nothingness, the formlessness of the days and months and years to come, that was unbearable.

Without her there was nothing. Yet he had no idea who she was.