Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

‘Bastard,’ says Mira, when he slumps into her arms and tells her. ‘I’ve never liked that guy – Bertram? Bertrand? Bastard .’ She rises onto her tiptoes and puts her palms to Daniel’s cheeks. ‘Where are the ethics? Where are the goddamned ethics?’

Outside, the garage light illuminates the woods that border their garden. A deer sniffs at sticks beyond the first scrim of trees. The landscape has turned brown so quickly this year.

‘Use it to your advantage,’ Mira says. ‘We’ll spend the next two weeks building your case. In the meantime, you’ll have a break; think about what you’d like to get out of it.’

Scrolling through Daniel’s mind, as if across a television screen: the list of disqualifying conditions. Ulceration, varices, fistula, achalasia, or other dysmotility disorders. Atresia or severe microtia. Meniere’s syndrome. Dorsiflexion to ten degrees. Absence of great toe(s). On and on – thousands of regulations in all. For women, it’s even more restrictive. Ovarian cysts. Abnormal bleeding. It’s a wonder anyone gets through at all, but then again, it’s also a wonder that most people, despite rising rates of cancer and diabetes and cardiovascular disease, still live to the age of seventy-eight.

‘What are things you’ve been meaning to do?’ Mira continues. She’s trying to be strong, for his sake, but her anxiety is obvious: she always tries to keep busy when she’s worried. ‘You could rebuild the shed. Or get in touch with your family.’

Many years ago, Mira asked, with characteristic straightforwardness, why Daniel wasn’t closer to his siblings.

‘We’re not not close,’ he said.

‘Well, you’re not close,’ said Mira.

‘Sometimes we are,’ said Daniel, though the truth was muddier. There were times he thought of his siblings and felt love sing from him like a shofar, rich with joy and agony and eternal recognition: those three made from the same star stuff as he, those he’d known from the beginning of the beginning. But when he was with them, the smallest infraction made him irreversibly resentful. Sometimes, it was easier to think of them as characters – straitlaced Varya; Klara, dreamy and heedless – than to confront them in all of their off-putting, fully bloomed adulthood: their morning breath and foolish choices, their lives snaking into unfamiliar underbrush.

That night, he drifts into wooziness, then out again. He is thinking of his siblings and of waves, the process of falling asleep not unlike the ocean lapping shore. During one of their New Jersey vacations, Saul took Daniel’s siblings to a movie, but Daniel wanted to swim. He was seven. He and Gertie brought slotted plastic chairs to the beach, and Gertie read a novel while Daniel pretended to be Don Schollander, who had won four medals in Tokyo the year before. When the tide carried Daniel toward the horizon, he let it, electrified by the growing distance between himself and his mother. By the time he grew tired of treading water, he had drifted fifty yards from shore.

The ocean sloshed in his nose, in his mouth. His legs were long and useless. He spat and tried to yell, but Gertie couldn’t hear him. Only because a sudden wind blew her sun hat into the sand did she stand and, in retrieving it, see Daniel’s dropping head.

She let go of the hat and ran to Daniel in what felt like slow motion, though it was the fastest she had ever moved. She wore a diaphanous muumuu over her bathing suit whose hem she had to carry; then, with a roar of consternation, she pulled the whole thing off and left it shriveled on the ground. Underneath was a black one-piece with a skirted hem that revealed her stout and dimpled thighs. She sloshed through the shallow water before inhaling deeply and plunging into the waves. Hurry , thought Daniel, gargling salt water. Hurry, Mama . He had not called her that since he was a toddler. At last, her hands appeared beneath his armpits. She dragged him out of the water and together they collapsed in the sand. Her entire body was red, her hair slicked to her head like an aviator’s helmet. She was heaving great breaths that Daniel thought were from exertion before he realized she was sobbing.

At dinner that evening, he told the story of the near-drowning with pomp, but inside, he glowed with renewed attachment to his family. For the rest of the vacation, he forgave Varya her most sustained sleep-babbling. He let Klara take the first shower when they returned from the beach, even though her showers took so long that Gertie once banged on the door to ask why, if she needed this much water, Klara did not bring a bar of soap into the ocean. Years later, when Simon and Klara left home – and after that, when even Varya pulled away from him – Daniel could not understand why they didn’t feel what he had: the regret of separation, and the bliss of being returned. He waited. After all, what could he say? Don’t drift too far. You’ll miss us . But as the years passed and they did not, he became wounded and despairing, then bitter.

At two a.m., he walks downstairs to the study. He leaves the overhead light off – the bluish glow of the computer screen is light enough – and enters the address for Raj and Ruby’s website. When it loads, large red words appear on the screen.

Experience the WONDERS OF INDIA without leaving your seat! Let RAJ AND RUBY take you on a MAGIC CARPET RIDE of otherworldly delights, from the Indian Needle Trick to the Great Rope Mystery, which famously confounded HOWARD THURSTON – the greatest AMERICAN MAGICIAN of the TWENTIETH CENTURY!

The capitalized letters dance and blink. Below them, Raj’s and Ruby’s faces loom, bindis on their foreheads. There’s a rotating slideshow in the center of the webpage. In one image, Raj is trapped in a basket that Ruby has stabbed with two long swords. In another, Raj holds a snake as thick as Daniel’s neck.

It’s gaudy, Daniel thinks. Exploitative. Then again, it’s Vegas: clearly, gaudy is a selling point. He’s been twice – first for a friend’s bachelor party, then for a medical conference. Both times, it struck him as a uniquely American monstrosity, everything a blown-up cartoon version of itself. Restaurants called Margaritaville and Cabo Wabo. Volcanoes spewing pink smoke. The Forum Shops, a mall built to look like ancient Rome. Who could feel, living there, like they were in the real world? At least Raj and Ruby travel: their show is based at the Mirage, but a link marked Touring & Schedule shows that they’re performing at Boston’s Mystery Lounge this weekend. In two weeks, they’ll begin a monthlong run in New York City.

Daniel wonders where they plan to spend Thanksgiving. Raj has largely kept Ruby from the Golds, reappearing and disappearing her every couple of years like a rabbit in a hat. Daniel saw her as a passionate three-year-old, then a somber, observant child of five and nine, last as a sullen preteen. That visit ended with an explosive argument about the Jaws of Life, Klara’s signature act. Raj was teaching it to Ruby, which sickened Daniel. He could not fathom why Raj would want to re-create the image of Klara hanging from a rope via her daughter.

‘I’m keeping her memory alive,’ Raj had roared. ‘Can you say the same?’

They haven’t spoken since, though this isn’t just Raj’s fault. There have been plenty of times when Daniel could have reached out – certainly before that falling-out, and even after. But being in the presence of Raj and Ruby has always given Daniel a disturbing feeling of regret. When Ruby was young, she looked like Raj, but in her teens, she assumed Klara’s full, dimpled cheeks and Cheshire cat smile. Long, curly hair fell to her waist like Klara’s, except that Ruby’s was brown – Klara’s natural color – instead of red. Sometimes, when she was moody, Daniel experienced a phantasmagoric sense of déjà vu. With holographic ease, Ruby became her mother, and Klara stared at Daniel with accusation. He had not been close enough to her, had not known how sick she was. He had initiated their visit to the fortune teller, too, which affected all of his siblings, but perhaps Klara most of all. He still remembers the way she looked in the alley afterward: wet-cheeked and raw-nosed, her eyes both alert and strangely vacant.