Хлоя Бенджамин: The Immortalists

‘What about you?’ he asks, putting the phone back in his pocket. ‘What’s your family like?’

‘My older brother was a doctor, as I mentioned. My younger brother was a dancer. And my sister was a magician.’

‘No shit. With a black hat and a rabbit?’

‘Neither.’ Around them, the lighting is dim, so Varya can’t pick out things to worry her. ‘She was fantastic with cards, and she was a mentalist – her partner would pick an item from the audience, a hat or a wallet, and she would guess it without verbal cues, blindfolded and facing the wall.’

‘What are they doing now?’ asks Luke, and she startles. He watches her. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you used the past tense. I thought they must have –’

‘Retired?’ asks Varya, and shakes her head. ‘No. They’re gone.’ She doesn’t know what makes her say what she does next; perhaps it’s that Luke is leaving, and there is something that feels so unusual, so relieving, about sharing with another person these things she’s only told a therapist. ‘My youngest brother died of AIDS; he was twenty. My sister – took her life. Looking back, I’ve wondered if she was bipolar or schizophrenic, not that there’s anything I can do about it now.’ She finishes her glass and pours another; she rarely drinks, and the wine makes her feel lazy, dulled, open. ‘Daniel got caught up in something he shouldn’t have. He was shot.’

Luke is quiet, gazing at her, and for a ridiculous moment she fears he will reach out and squeeze her hand. But he doesn’t – why would he? – and she exhales.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘Is that why you do the work you do?’ She does not answer, and he pushes on, hesitantly at first and then with deliberateness. ‘The medications we have now – well, they would have saved your brother’s life, if they’d been available back then. And genetic testing could make it possible to detect an individual’s risk of mental illness, even to diagnose them. That might have saved Klara, right?’

‘What is your article about?’ Varya asks. ‘My work, or me?’

She tries to keep her voice light. Inside her is a vein of fear, though she isn’t sure why.

‘It’s difficult to separate the two, isn’t it?’ When Luke leans forward, his eyes loom, and something deep in Varya lurches. She realizes it now, what frightened her: she never told him Klara’s name.

‘I should leave,’ she mumbles, pressing her hands to the table to stand. Immediately the floor seesaws upward, the walls sway, and she sits – she falls – down again.

‘Don’t,’ says Luke, and now he does place his hand on hers.

A bubble of panic climbs her throat and bursts. ‘Please don’t touch me,’ she says, and Luke lets go. His face is sorrowful; he finds her pathetic, and this is more than she can tolerate. She stands again and this time is successful.

‘You shouldn’t drive,’ Luke says, standing, too. She sees panic in his face, the same panic she feels, and this alarms her even more. ‘Please – I’m sorry.’

She fumbles with her wallet, drawing out a thin stack of twenties, which she deposits on the table. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Let me drive you,’ he presses as she makes her way to the door. ‘Where do you live?’

‘Where do I live?’ she hisses, and Luke drops back; even in the dark of the bar she can see him redden. ‘What’s wrong with you?’ and she is now at the door, she is outside of it. After checking behind to make sure Luke is not following her, she sees her car and runs.

She wakes on Saturday to a crunch of pain in the center of her back and a hammer in her skull. Her clothes are wet with sweat and stink. She kicked off her shoes in the night, and her sweater as well, but her blouse sticks to her stomach and her socks are so damp that when she peels them off they drop heavily to the floor of the car. She sits up in the backseat. Outside, it is morning, and Grant Street is thick with rain.

She brings the heels of her hands to her eyes. She remembers the wine bar, Luke’s face coming toward her, his voice low but insistent – It’s difficult to separate the two, isn’t it? – and his hand on hers, which was hot. She remembers running to the car, and curling in the backseat like a child.

She is starving. She crawls from the backseat to the front and scrabbles around in the passenger seat for yesterday’s leftovers. The apples have turned spongy and brown, but she eats them anyway, as well as the warm, puckered grapes. She avoids the car mirror but catches sight of herself, accidentally, in the passenger side window – her hair like Einstein’s, her mouth drooping open – before she looks away and finds her keys.

At her condo, she strips off her clothes, depositing everything directly in the washing machine, and showers for so long the water turns cool. She pulls on her bathrobe – pink and ridiculously fluffy, a gift from Gertie, something Varya never would have bought for herself – and takes as much Advil as she thinks her body can stand. Then she climbs into bed and sleeps again.

It’s mid-afternoon when she wakes up. Now that she is no longer purely exhausted, she feels a bolt of panic and knows she cannot spend the rest of the day at home. She dresses quickly. Her face is pale and birdlike and her silver hair sticks up in tufts. She wets her hands and smooths it down, then wonders why: the only people at the lab on Saturdays are the animal techs, and anyway, Varya will put a hair cover on as soon as she arrives. She doesn’t usually eat lunch, but today she grabs another baggie from the refrigerator and eats the hardboiled eggs as she drives.

As soon as she enters the lab, she feels calmer. She pulls on her scrubs and walks into the vivarium.

She wants to check on the monkeys. It still makes her nervous to be close to them, but she is sometimes beset by the fear that something will happen to them while she is gone. Nothing has, of course. Josie uses her mirror to look at the doorway and, when she sees Varya, lets the mirror drop. The infants skitter anxiously in their communal enclosure. Gus sits in the back of his cage. But the last cage – Frida’s cage – is empty.

‘Frida?’ Varya asks, absurdly; there is no proof that the monkeys understand their names, and yet she says it again. She leaves the vivarium and walks down the hallway, calling, until an animal technician named Johanna steps out of the kitchen.

‘She’s in isolation,’ Johanna says.

‘Why?’

‘She was plucking,’ says Johanna, rapidly. ‘I thought, in isolation, she might –’

But she does not finish, because Varya has already turned around.

The second floor of the lab is a square. Varya and Annie’s office is on the western side, the vivarium north. The kitchen is south, along with the procedure rooms, and the isolation chamber – as well as the janitor’s closet and the laundry room – is east. At six feet wide by eight tall, the isolation chamber is actually bigger than the monkeys’ normal cages. But it is devoid of enrichment, a place where disobedient animals are sent to be punished. Of course, there is nothing threatening about it, nothing overtly frightening. There is merely nothing interesting about it, either: it is a stainless steel cage with a small, square door for entry, which locks from the outside. It’s equipped with a food box and a water bottle. There are four inches between the floor and the bottom of the chamber, which has been drilled with holes to allow urine and waste to drop into a retractable pan.

‘Frida,’ says Varya. She looks into the chamber, the same place she brought Frida on the night of her arrival, when the monkey was only days old.

Now Frida faces the rear of the cage and rocks in place, hunching. Her back is bald in fist-sized areas where she pulled the hair out. Six months ago, she stopped grooming what fur she has, and the other animals keep away, sensing her weakness, repelled by it. She sits in a thin layer of rust-colored urine that has not yet drained into the pan.