Robin Wasserman - Girls on Fire

THERE’S A HIDDEN TRACK ON Nevermind . You’d never find it if you didn’t know it was there. First “Something in the Way” fades out, with a final soft crash of cymbals and Kurt’s dying hum and then nothing.

Nothing for thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. What comes next is only for us, the ones who care enough to endure the silence. First the drumbeat, thrumming into the too-quiet like jungle cannibals. Then the lion roars: Kurt’s voice, pure and gleaming; Kurt’s voice like a knife scything the sky. It’s the raging of a man not going gentle into that good night. The silence is part of it, those thirteen minutes of agony, and Kurt’s in it with you, muzzled and frenzied as the seconds tick by and the pressure mounts and finally, when he can’t bear it any more than you can, he tears off the muzzle and goes fucking nuts . Thirteen minutes, fifty-one seconds. It doesn’t seem like it would be that long. But time stretches.

Remember what we read about black holes, Dex? How from the outside, from a safe distance away, when you watch someone fall into a black hole, they fall slower and slower, until they seem to freeze at the event horizon? How they’ll stay there forever, suspended over the dark, the future always just out of reach?

It’s a trick. If you’re the one falling, time keeps right on going. You sail past the event horizon; you get sucked into the black. And no one on the outside will ever know.

That’s how it was, in the dark place. No boundary between yourself and the dark, past and future, something and nothing. You could scream all you wanted, and the dark would swallow it whole. In the dark place, silence was the same as noise.

IN PRISON THEY CALL IT the hole, at least if you want to believe prison movies, and if you can’t believe the movies, then half of what I know about the world is bullshit. But in prison movies, the hole is just some cell like all the others. At Horizons, it’s a fucking hole in the ground.

In the dark place, you tell yourself, This time I will hold on. This time you’ll keep it together, remember that time passes and there are no monsters hiding in the dark. When the slab creaks open each day and the food drops down, you’ll fling it back in their faces, along with fistfuls of your own shit. When they lower the rope and offer to lift you back into the sun, if only you’ll apologize and say thank you , you’ll laugh and tell them to come back later, you were in the middle of a nap. This time the dark place will be your gift, your vacation from the torments of daily life. This time will be your time.

Bullshit.

The dark place is always the same.

First it’s boring. Then it’s lonely. Then the fear washes in, and when that tide ebbs, there’s nothing left. Silence fills with all the thoughts you spend your daylight life trying not to think. The bad things you’ve done. The blue of the sky. The bodies rotting away in coffins, the maggots feasting on skeletal remains. What happened to the body when you left it behind, and whether now is your time to return. Your food is damp with tears. It tastes like shit and piss, because that’s all you can smell, that and your rotting sweat and shame. The air is hot and stale, thick with your own breath. When the darkness breaks and a voice cracks the silence, you tell them whatever they want to hear.

No, not you . That’s cheating. I don’t know what you would do, Dex. This is what I did.

“I accept Jesus into my heart.”

“I renounce Satan.”

“I have sinned and I will sin no more.”

I always gave in — and that’s something I’ll never not know about myself — but at least I held out longer than most. It was because of Kurt. He was down there with me. Down there is where he lives . Singing was better than screaming. I sang with him; I remembered you. I lived for you, down in that dark place, and I survived knowing you were somewhere up in the light, living for me.

YOU’RE GOING,” MY MOTHER SAID. “We both are.”

I felt ancient, but when it came to my mother, apparently I’d never be too old for because I said so . We went. A mother-daughter pool party, awkward purgatory of small talk and cellulite that only a Drummond could dream up.

“It was lovely of them to think of us.” My mother navigated our beat-up Olds into a narrow slot between a Mazda and an Audi, tapping the bumpers of each of them once, as if for luck. Nikki’s house couldn’t have been more than a five-minute drive from mine, but it felt like we’d passed through a portal — or maybe through a TV screen, because the sidewalk maples, the colonnade-lined porches, the impeccably pruned rectangles of green all seemed too perfect to be anything but a set. Tragedy or farce, that was the only question. “And it’ll be lovely for you to spend some time with your friends.”

Okay, farce.

“How many times do I have to tell you—”

“All right. Girls who could be your friends. If you would only give them the opportunity.”

How was it, I wondered, that the mere act of growing older precipitated radical memory loss? Here was my mother, naively expecting not only that a coven of PTA moms who’d snubbed her for a decade would spontaneously open their arms to her unmanicured charm, but also that their daughters would follow suit.

“You really want me to go to a party ? After what happened the last time.” It was a mark of my desperation that I was willing to come so close to explicitly referencing it. “Aren’t you afraid of what I’ll do?”

For someone with no sense of humor, my mother had an expert wry smile. “Why do you think I came as your chaperone?”

It should have been worth something she was willing to be seen in public with me — but then she was my mother, so that was worth about as much as her telling me I was pretty.

“You can’t control what people think of you,” she said. “You can only do your best to prove them wrong.”

“Guilty until proven innocent? I don’t think that’s how it’s supposed to work.”

“Life isn’t LA Law , dear.” She turned off the car. We were actually doing this.

“Lacey’s gone,” I said, the last-ditch effort worth the pain of saying the words out loud. “No more bad influence. No need to sucker me into making new friends.”

She put her hand over mine — then pulled away before I could. “You know, Hannah, my issue with Lacey was never Lacey . Not entirely.”

“Is that one of those Zen things that make no sense?”

“I know how it feels,” she said. “To invest everything you have in another person. But no one’s dreams are big enough to be worth giving up yours, Hannah. If you don’t figure that out before it’s too late, you can wake up inside a life you’d never have chosen for yourself.”

“I don’t know what any of that has to do with me.”

My mother did not talk like this, and she certainly didn’t talk like this with me. We weren’t equipped for it, either of us.

“You can’t dream someone else’s dreams forever, Hannah. And when you finally stop, it’s no good for anyone.” She clapped her hands together, plastic again with a Teflon smile, as if I’d simply imagined that, for a moment, she’d somehow melted into a real person. “Let’s get going. We wouldn’t want them thinking we’re rude.”

“Who cares what they think? They treat you like crap.” I didn’t say it to hurt her; it didn’t occur to me, then, that I could hurt her.

Framed in fake gilt on my mother’s bureau was a photo of the girl she’d once been, posing at a ballet recital with her younger sister, who, unlike my mother, was actually built to be a ballerina. The two of them were frozen midpirouette, my aunt’s form perfect and her smile beaming, my mother sullen and dumpy with a familiar thicket of frizz — her hair had gone limp after pregnancy, something else to blame me for. If this had been a movie, we would have bonded over our mutual ugly-duckness; of course, in the Hollywood version, my mother would have blossomed into an intimidating swan rather than simply expanding into a slightly taller, substantially thicker duck, one who sometimes didn’t seem to like me very much. For which I couldn’t blame her: She probably didn’t enjoy the daily reminder of her yesterday any more than I wanted the glimpse into my tomorrow.