Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

—

After their drink Jonathan walked and walked, all the way to the Coliseum. As he approached it at dusk he could make out a gray cloud lifting up from the majestic structure, smoky and billowing against a pink sky. Coming closer he realized that the cloud was made of bats, hundreds of bats, rising above the city.

Their jittery view: quick fragments of ruins, sharp sightings of cypress, jagged jump cuts of slow buses and shuffling crowds of tourists, the sloping rise and fall of the hills as seen from the slanted perspective of a winged, nocturnal creature.

—

He looked at the cloud of bats dispersing into the night. Nothing was pure, thought Jonathan. We are all complicit. This idea was his version of believing that everything is connected. It was almost spiritual. Almost.

AS DIFFICULT AS it had been for Neva to carry out Steve’s request, as much as she had dreaded it, then prepared for it, and finally accomplished it, she had never expected that seeing traces of a situation similar to the one in which she had been held captive years ago would have so terrible an effect on her. She had not anticipated that finding evidence of the horrible inhuman business that she had escaped would make her feel so removed from herself, so thrown. It should not have been surprising, but so many things in her life should not have been. This was yet another unsurprising surprise.

At the hotel she had asked for the woman whom she was supposed to meet and had been required to sit on a stained microsuede club chair facing an undercleaned wall-length fish tank. She had waited dutifully for a long time until a “manager” had come out to meet her. The manager was a man with a beard. He had taken her to a small office and asked her many questions, about her background, her experiences, her interests, her address, her phone number, her friends’ names. She had prepared for these kinds of questions, but still as the interview went on she could tell that her responses were unsatisfactory. She was a good actress, but not a great one. She could not conceal the traces of sophistication that had marked her in the last few years. Nor could she successfully convey the desperation necessary for someone to believe that she would be seeking out this kind of nightmare. The manager was not naïve. He was not convinced. Neva was persuasive enough not to arouse his suspicions too strongly — she did a compelling drug addict and a passable criminal — but it was clear that he would not take her on, would not even attempt to lure her into his fold. She was not vulnerable enough. Her nervous glances around the room had been too curious, her posture too dignified, her shoes too clean.

—

After returning to the designated meeting spot, seeing Angel’s relieved face, riding in silence across the bridge, and changing clothes discreetly in the backseat before getting out at the apartment building that she now called home, Neva was unable for a long time to understand what she was doing. It’s all over now and I’m fine, she kept saying in her head, but she felt more anxious and confused now than she had earlier in the day or even during her expedition. I’m alone. I’m safe. I’m Neva. I have a good job. I take care of children. I’m home. No matter how many times she repeated this mantra in her head she still felt disoriented. It wasn’t until she was sitting with Roman helping him with his gladiator project that she realized why.

She had been hoping before today that she would find nothing at the hotel. No trace of the subjugation and slaughtering of will that she had once endured. Now she realized that her former life had been caged inside of her, the memory of it trapped and caught like a wild animal. But on seeing the hotel, the manager, his dirty office, and the tiny hints of that parallel world, her old memories had begun to press against their cage, beating themselves on the gates of consciousness, and then had burst through the bars, ragged and bloody, dumb things, stumbling, again and again, riding along like dead bodies on horses that keep running, blind yet gaping, unable to stop. Looking out the window of Roman’s room across the rooftops she felt images and feelings circling madly in her head, exhausting, tragic in their unceasing gallop, a barely contained pandemonium.

—

I thought gladiators would be cooler, Roman said.

Well, said Neva, you have to do some research. Have you read the books?

Roman rolled his head back and closed his eyes, as if the word “books” had been conceived to torture him.

I looked at them, he said, with his eyes closed.

—

Out the window, a distant corner of Central Park. A stirring of wind that begins in the clouds. Branches sway. A whole swath of them bends and they brush one another and to Neva it looks like water flowing. Then she remembers: I am a river. And she thinks: I will carry these memories on the current that is my strength. These memories will flow through me like corpses on horses swimming across a river and these horses will drop their burdens, let them fall. These bodies will fall into my waters, float along, and they will sink. These bodies are old memories, gone forever and dead to me now. They cannot hurt me. I will lower them down. I will let them fall to the bottom of the cold and muddy river. They will drift or they will dissolve. These memories will be borne along or they will drown. They will be a part of me but they will not stop me. They will not slow me down. I will carry them, bear them, dissolve them, decompose them, but I will not let them slow me down.

—

What did the books say? Neva asked Roman.

Nothing, said Roman.

Nothing? Not one word about gladiators? asked Neva.

Roman threw a basketball across the room. It bounced off the corner of the ceiling and landed on his bed, steadied for a moment, and rolled off onto the floor, a rogue idea.

I don’t remember, he said.

—

Neva told Steve what she had seen and heard at the hotel and he arranged for some form of authority — she was not sure if it was the police or a private security firm or his own men — to remove the people who were using his property for illegal purposes. The whole thing ended quickly. Nobody knew. It wasn’t in the papers or on the Internet. There were no arrests or sentences. There was no story. The hotels were clean again. The storm held at bay. The darkness, with its roiling current and riderless horses, was gone.

—

It appeared to Neva that Steve had handled the incident with expert firmness and calm, dispatching his people, displacing the intruders, protecting his kingdom, and restoring order. But she noticed in the following days that he seemed older, less agile in his movements and thoughts, as if a rumor of his aging had spread and shadowed him and had now — perception as they say being reality — come true. His thick wavy hair looked slightly less robust, his tailored jacket hung with the tiniest gap around his neck, a new shrugging looseness through his shoulders. His relationship to age had always been perfectly clear: any businessman or gambler knew that the first one to give a number would lose. So Neva understood that Steve would never go first in this negotiation. He would maintain his poker face, assess risk with equanimity, acknowledge his ignorance, tolerate uncertainty, protect against fragility, and prepare for pain. But he could not abide weakness, disease, or dying. They were unacceptable.

—

He awoke in the night coughing and he continued to cough until his lungs felt raw. He sat up in bed and Patrizia sat up with him and then went to get him water. When she returned, the coughing had subsided and he was sitting in a chair with a blanket wrapped around his head and shoulders and he drank the water slowly and set the glass on a side table. He looked absurd but no one would have laughed. Out the window the darkness tilted gently toward morning. The buildings across the park on Central Park West twinkled in the charcoal light, a dashboard lit up from within, a control panel waiting to be instructed and manipulated, as if the city itself were a car or an airplane at the ready, keys in the ignition, wanting, begging to be driven.