Хлоя Бенджамин - The Immortalists

At one point she looked up and saw their reflection in the mirror mounted to the outside of the cage. What came to her then was Frida Kahlo’s Self-Portrait with Monkey . Varya did not look like Kahlo – she was not as strong, she was not as defiant – and the lab, with its beige concrete walls, could not be further from Kahlo’s yucca and large, glossy leaves. But there was the monkey in Varya’s arms, her eyes dark and enormous as blackberries; there were the two of them, equally fearful, equally alone, staring into the mirror together.

Three and a half years ago, when Varya arrived in Kingston after Daniel’s death, Mira brought her into the guest room and shut the door.

‘There’s something I need to show you,’ she said.

Mira sat on the edge of the bed, a laptop on her thighs. With her legs taut and her toes grasping the carpet, she showed Varya a series of cached webpages: Google searches about the Rom, a screenshot of Bruna Costello on the FBI’s Most Wanted site. Varya recognized the woman immediately. At once, she felt a head rush: dizzying, silver confetti. She nearly slid to the floor.

‘This is the woman Daniel decided to pursue. He took our gun from the shed and drove to West Milton, where she was living. And I called the agent who shot him,’ said Mira; her voice bent like a reed. ‘Why, Varya? Why did Daniel do it?’

So Varya told Mira the story of the woman. Her voice was raspy, the words flaking like rust, but she forced them until they ran faster, clearer. She was desperate to help Mira understand. When she finished, though, Mira looked even more bewildered.

‘But that was so long ago,’ she said. ‘So deep in the past.’

‘It wasn’t, for him.’ Varya’s tears ran freely; she wiped her cheeks with her fingers.

‘But it should have been. It should be.’ Mira’s eyes were bloodshot, her throat scarlet. ‘Goddammit, Varya. My God! If only he had let it go.’

They strategized about what to tell Gertie. Varya wanted to say that Daniel had become fixated on a local woman’s crimes after his suspension – that the notion of justice gave him something to work for, to believe in. Mira wanted to be honest.

‘What does it matter whether we tell her the truth?’ she asked. ‘The story isn’t going to bring Daniel back. It won’t change how he died.’

But Varya disagreed. She knew that stories did have the power to change things: the past and the future, even the present. She had been an agnostic since graduate school, but if there was one tenant of Judaism with which she agreed, it was this: the power of words. They weaseled under door cracks and through keyholes. They hooked into individuals and wormed through generations. The truth might change Gertie’s perception of her children, children who weren’t alive to defend themselves. It would almost certainly cause her more pain.

That night, while Mira and Gertie slept, Varya climbed out of the guest bed and walked to the study. Specks of Daniel were everywhere – comforting in their familiarity, agonizing in their superficiality. Beside the computer was a paperweight in the shape of the Golden Gate Bridge, which Varya purchased at SFO when she was a harried postdoc, en route to Kingston for Hanukkah, and realized she’d forgotten gifts. She’d hoped Daniel would mistake it for a piece of art. He didn’t. ‘An airport tchotchke?’ he hooted, swatting her. Now, the gold plating had turned a coppery green; she had not known he’d kept it all these years.

She sat in his chair and tipped her head back. She had not gone to Amsterdam over Thanksgiving, as she’d told him; there was no conference. She had defrosted a bag of chopped vegetables, sautéed them in olive oil, and ate the sloppy pile at the kitchen table by herself. That fall, her anxiety about Daniel’s date had become acute. She did not know what would happen that day, did not think she could stand to witness it – or perhaps it was that, if she were there, she would feel responsible. She still feared she might catch or transmit something terrible, as though her luck was both bad and contagious. The best thing she could do for Daniel was stay away.

But by nine in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving, her heart had begun to palpitate. She was sweating so profusely that a cold shower provided only a temporary reprieve. Varya did what she’d sworn she wouldn’t and called him. He made some remark about finding the fortune teller, something she thought was flip and hadn’t believed. Then came the old guilt trip, Daniel’s voice becoming gnawing and childlike – It would have been nice to have you here yesterday – and she felt an irritation suffused with self-hatred. There were times she deleted his voice mails without listening to them so that she did not have to hear this tone of voice, a maddening and indefatigable woundedness, as if he was content to be let down over and over again. Why did he keep trying? He had Mira, after all. The sooner he realized that Varya had nothing to offer, that she would only continue to fail him, the sooner he would be happy, free of her, and the sooner Varya would be released by him.

A dry-cleaning receipt, previously pinned down by the paperweight, fluttered next to the computer. Daniel’s neat, boxy handwriting bled through from the other side.

Varya turned it over. Our language is our strength , he’d written. Beneath that was a second phrase, one Daniel had traced over so many times that it seemed to rise, three-dimensionally, from the page: Thoughts have wings.

She knew exactly what it meant. Once, in graduate school, she tried to explain this phenomenon to her first therapist.

‘It’s not a question of seeing something is clean,’ she said. ‘It’s a question of feeling it’s clean.’

‘And what if you don’t?’ the therapist asked. ‘Feel something’s clean?’

Varya paused. The truth was that she did not know exactly what would happen; she simply felt a constant foreboding, the sense that ruin loomed behind her like a shadow, and that the rituals could continue to forestall it.

‘Then something bad will happen,’ she said.

When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.

Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.

She was thirteen and a half when it occurred to her that avoiding cracks in the sidewalk could prevent the woman’s prediction from coming true for Klara. At her fourteenth birthday, it felt imperative to blow out all her candles as quickly as possible, because something awful would happen to Simon if she didn’t. She missed three candles and Simon, eight years old, blew out the rest. Varya yelled at him, knowing it made her seem selfish, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Simon’s act had ruined her attempt to protect him.

She was not diagnosed until the age of thirty. These days, every child has an acronym to explain what’s wrong with them, but when Varya was young, the compulsions seemed like nothing but her own secret burden. They became worse after Simon’s death. Still, not until graduate school did it occur to her that she might want to try therapy, and not until her therapist mentioned OCD did it occur to her that there was a name for the constant hand-washing, the toothbrushing, the avoidance of public restrooms and Laundromats and hospitals and touching doors and subway seats and other people’s hands, all the rituals that safeguarded every hour, every day, every month, every year.