Хлоя Бенджамин: The Immortalists

Varya takes the handkerchief and wipes her face, and when she emerges she thinks of what Luke said – that I’ll kill them accidentally – and laughs until he joins in and she begins to cry again, because she understands exactly what he means.

She drives to her condominium in silence while Luke follows behind. As she climbs the stairs, she hears his footsteps behind her, feels the weight of his body, and her stomach wedges in her throat. She rarely brings anyone into her condo, and if she’d known he was coming she would have readied it. But there is no time for that now, so she flicks on the lights and watches as he takes it in.

The condo is small. Its decoration is a balancing act that aims to reduce her anxiety as much as possible. She chose pieces that both enhance and obstruct visibility: her couch is leather, for example, dark enough that she can’t see every speck of fuzz or dirt, but smooth enough that – unlike a nubbly, patterned fabric – she can easily skim it for anything egregious before sitting down. Her sheets are a dull charcoal for the same reason; the white sheets in hotels are so bare a canvas that she nears hysterics every time she checks the beds. The walls are devoid of artwork, the tables without linens and so easier to clean. The drapes are drawn, as they always are, even during the day.

Not until she sees the condo through Luke’s eyes does she remember how dark it is, and how ugly. The furniture is not aesthetically pleasing, because she does not choose it for aesthetic reasons. And if she did? She hardly knows what her taste would be, though once she passed a shop in Mill Valley that specialized in Scandinavian décor and saw a dove-gray sofa with rectangular pillows and slender, walnut legs. She stared for thirty seconds, a minute, before she remembered that the fabric would be terrible to clean, that she would be able to see every hair and stain, and that, most of all, it would be grossly painful to get rid of it if she ever became convinced of its filth.

‘Can I get you something?’ she asks. ‘Tea?’

Tea is fine, Luke tells her, and sits on the couch to wait for her, dropping his backpack at his feet. When she returns with two mugs and a ceramic pot of Genmaicha, he has his knees pressed together and the tape recorder in his lap.

‘Can I record us?’ he asks. ‘So I can remember this. I don’t think I’ll see you again.’

He knows the trade-off he has made; so he accepts it. He has caught her and will make her speak but has earned her resentment in return. Still, she has made a bargain, too: she chose to be his mother, and so she’ll answer him.

‘Okay.’ Her face is dry and the fury she felt at the lab has been replaced, for the moment, by resignation. She is reminded of the monkeys, the ones who have screamed themselves hoarse and give their bodies over to be studied with vacant acceptance.

‘Thank you.’ Luke’s gratitude is genuine: she can feel it reaching for her, and looks away. ‘Where and when was I born?’

‘Mount Sinai Beth Israel; August 11th, 1984. It was eleven thirty-two in the morning. You didn’t know that?’

‘I did. Just checking your memory.’

She brings the mug to her mouth, but the tea is scalding, and her eyes water.

‘No more tricks,’ she says. ‘You’ve asked for my honesty. I deserve yours in return. You don’t have to be suspicious of me; you don’t have to try to catch me in a lie. I could not forget this – any of this – if I spent my life trying.’

‘Fair enough.’ Luke’s gaze drops. ‘I won’t, anymore. Forgive me.’ When he looks at her again, his cockiness has been peeled away. What remains is sheepish, shy. ‘What was it like, that day?’

‘The day you were born? It was sweltering. The window of my room looked out over Stuyvesant Square, and I could see women walking by, women my age, in cutoffs and crop tops, like it was still the seventies. I was enormous. I had a rash down my front and sweat in every possible crevice. My feet had swelled so much I wore slippers in the cab to the airport.’

‘Was anyone with you?’

‘My mother. She was the only one I told.’

Gertie by her side, murmuring. Gertie with a washcloth and a bucket of ice water; Gertie who bellowed at the nurses every time the air conditioner stopped working. Gertie, who has kept her secret all these years. ‘Mama,’ said Varya, wildly, after she gave the baby over. ‘I can’t talk about this again, not ever,’ and since that day Gertie has not raised the subject. All the same, they talk about it constantly: for years, it was the lining to every conversation, it was a weight they carried heavily in tandem.

‘What about the father?’

She notices that he says ‘the father’ instead of ‘my father,’ which relieves her. She does not want him to think of the professor that way.

‘He never knew.’ She blows on her tea. ‘He was a visiting professor at NYU. I was in my first year of graduate school, and that fall, I took his class. We slept together a couple of times before he said he thought we shouldn’t. By the time I realized I was pregnant it was early January, the winter holiday, and he’d flown back to the UK, though I didn’t know that then. I called him over and over – first at the department and then at the number they gave me for his office in Edinburgh. In the beginning I left messages, and then I tried not leaving them. It wasn’t that I was in love with him. I wasn’t, not anymore. But I wanted to give him a chance to raise you, if he wanted to. Finally I understood he didn’t deserve it, and that was when I stopped calling.’

Luke’s face is constricted, his throat ridged with veins. How did she not recognize him? She has imagined it – coming face-to-face with a strange but familiar man in an airport or a grocery store – and thought an animal awareness would rise within her, some sense memory of the nine months they shared a body and the breathtaking, anguished forty-eight hours that followed. She would not have been surprised to hear her pelvis shattered during the birth, but it had not: her experience was utterly normal, the birth so routine a nurse said it boded well for Varya’s second. But Varya knew there would not be a second and so she clutched the tiny human, her biological son, and said goodbye not just to him but to the part of her that had been brave enough to love a man who thought so little of her and carry a child she knew she would not keep.

Luke takes off his shoes and brings his socked feet to the sofa. Then he wraps his arms around them, letting his chin rest on his knees. ‘What was I like?’

‘You had a shiny pelt of black hair, like an otter, or a punk kid. Your eyes were blue, but the nurses said they might turn brown – which, of course, they did.’ Varya kept this in mind when she scanned sidewalks and subway cars and the background faces in other people’s photos, looking for the blue- or brown-eyed child that had been hers. ‘You were sensitive. When you got overstimulated, you shut your eyes and pressed your hands together. We thought you looked like a monk, my mother and I, annoyed and trying very hard to pray.’

‘Black hair.’ Luke smiles. ‘And blue eyes. It’s no wonder you didn’t how who I was.’ Outside the window, it is six o’clock and drizzling, the sky a luminous periwinkle. ‘Did your mom want you to give me up?’

‘God, no. We fought about it. Our family had been through a lot of loss. My father died, very suddenly, when I was in college. And two years before you were born, Simon died of AIDS. She wanted me to keep you.’

Varya had her own apartment by then, a studio near the university, but during the pregnancy, she often slept at 72 Clinton. Sometimes she argued with Gertie past midnight, but she still went to bed in her old top bunk. Ten minutes or two hours later, Gertie joined her, taking the bottom bunk that Daniel used to occupy instead of her own bed down the hall. In the mornings she stood on the bottom rung of the ladder to brush the hair away from Varya’s face and kiss her fatly on the forehead.