Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

—

A man reaches out in the dark and takes hold of her hair and grabs her as if she were on a leash. He walks her into the middle of the black space and swings her down on a damp mat. Several bodies have materialized in the room. One kneels behind her with his knees pressing on her hair and tightening around her head. Another’s eyes dart and swim in the gloom like round white fish as he grabs one arm and a leg. Another looms, towering, and spits out that they are not going to do anything to her now, as if this were not doing anything. She screams until someone covers her mouth. She bites the hand. It flies off for a moment and in that instant they smash something against her tongue, far back, toward her throat, cover her lips again, and tell her to swallow. The men’s voices have been rising and rising in crude excitement until they seemed not human but beings made of lava, corrugated metal, and dried blood. An unruly race of degenerates. Clubs dangling off their joints instead of limbs. Wretched wolves as big as ragged bears but not animal, instead mechanical. Their movements as if programmed by the sickest hack. Wild robots, abducted from the living, stripped of feeling and turned against life.

—

To enter into the deepest fears, to enter the house of the dead, is not really a matter of confrontation. It is a matter of holding on, grasping slippery walls in the dark, waving arms in the blackness, stumbling, finding a fallen wire, a thread of meaning. Surrounding that thread is an emptiness stretching outward, and upward, in every direction.

In that emptiness is the place beyond fear, beyond hope, where the last thought tries to rise and goes to die. Its charred and broken feathers whisper down.

STEVE HAS ALWAYS been the first one to wake, if he sleeps at all. This morning he hoists himself up, a beast rising, lumbers to the bathroom, his legs spindly in proportion to his massive torso, folds of Roman emperor flesh cascading as he moves. As he gets ready he is still half asleep, dreaming, he was dreaming about Poppy, days when she was little and he would wake up early with her. She might even have had the distinction in those days, over ten years ago, of getting up before him. He would peek into her room, find her playing, watch her unnoticed, wonder at the intricate games and the fantastical drawings. Was she working through the loss? Would she ever be okay? He asked these questions because he had loved his sister, and now his niece-turned-daughter, wildly, uncharacteristically, in a way that made no sense to him but which he could not deny. Poppy’s long little-girl hair fell to the floor as she sat and sang. Eventually she noticed him, did not stop singing, and they went to the kitchen together.

In those days he might make the two of them breakfast. In those days he would lift her up onto the counter, her nightgown puffing out around her knees as she elevated, sailed, in his arms.

He finishes dressing. Patrizia is still asleep. The boys are asleep. Neva’s door is closed. He knots his tie as he roams the hallways, finds himself in front of Poppy’s door. It is ajar. He imagines if he pushes it open he might find her sitting on the floor, singing. Or stretched out on the bed, drawing. One light turned on in the dim room. Her thoughtful face intent, her big eyes narrowed, concentrating. Her little-girl self preserved, not ghostly but immortal.

At the same time as the door swings open from his push, several images flash across his mind. Her cherry-red nose on the plane back from London when he told her she could not come to work for him yet. Her name printed in the documents he had had Ian sign that day in his office. Memories of attempting to protect her. Had they been misguided? More controlling than loving? He didn’t know. Couldn’t know. Those questions lay outside the bounds of his personality.

The room was empty.

Although the questions lay outside his ability to ask them, they did exist, somewhere, in his unconscious, in his deepest recesses of feeling, in his body.

The bed had not been slept in.

She might have slept at a friend’s.

But this had been a school night.

Of course she was practically finished with school, no college to go to next year; he brushed aside his disappointment.

The room was empty. It felt especially empty.

What was that sensation? A nausea, an ache in his shoulders, a wave of sickening remorse.

It was wrong that the room was empty. Wrong that she was gone.

—

The nausea blossomed as he rode down in the elevator. It bloomed up from his stomach to his chest, his neck, throughout his head, growing in lurches and grotesque fast-motion spurts of evolution, becoming different species of plant, of toxic flower. The ride down seemed uncomfortably long. As the flowers twisted and wrapped around his skull he noticed that the dull throbbing ache in his shoulders had become a verifiable anguish, a shooting prismatic cutting as if from a sharp diamond, a mineral slicing. He grabbed his head with his hand, as if he were trying to extract the guilt, the pain, by removing his face. He had done what he had thought was right but it was not enough. Or perhaps it had not been right. And he knew, instinctively, that he had pushed her away. Farther than away, he suspected. Somewhere he did not want to consider. He felt the sick logic of his life click into place. His hand fell limp at his side as the elevator doors opened, and he walked, much to his surprise, several steps.

—

Seized by a feeling, a question, and an answer all at once: “It’s so cold. What am I doing? This is it.” A reflection in the shape of a candle glanced off a mirror. The candle’s flame elongated, flared brighter than ever, lit up everything, shrunk, grew dim, and then returned to the hard silver of the mirror. A heavy door slowly swung shut, cutting off the warm wind and leaving only an air-conditioned chill.

—

Steve died in the lobby in the doorman’s arms. By the time the ambulance arrived it was over. While it happened, Neva was dropping off the boys. Patrizia was back in an examination room, dressing. Jonathan, Miranda, and Alix rushed to the hospital, meeting Patrizia and Neva there, but they were all too late.

Later, back at the apartment, everyone assembled except Poppy. No one could find her. The school had no record of Poppy’s arrival that morning. Patrizia’s assistant was trying all the numbers listed in the school directory. She couldn’t find a Jasmine Carpenter in Brooklyn. Maybe Patrizia had misheard the name. Poppy wasn’t picking up or answering texts. In the hectic disorganization of death, shock, grief, and stupor, a slow-moving confusion dictated the tone of events, settled on everything like a blowing ash. Individuals enacted their roles with no understanding of their meaning. People’s concern for Poppy surfaced and then sank, repeatedly, throughout the day. Amid all the upheaval and arrangements her absence was not forgotten, but overlooked.

—

No one knew that Steve had thought of her, would have been thinking of her had he been alive.

—

A haze clouded the proceedings although the day was sunny. Objects that stood out took on absurd significance, all out of proportion to their actual importance. On the way to pick up the boys from school, Neva felt she could see every leaf distinctly on every tree. The metal clip in Patrizia’s hair threw off bullets of sunlight as she hurried a bit ahead of Neva on the sidewalk. Patrizia had come with her, to tell the boys herself, sitting them on a park bench not far from school, hugging them and then nodding to Neva to help her get them home. Back in the apartment, Neva noticed Felix’s pants, crumpled on the floor of his room, and she thought the folded forlorn softness was a dog and she would never forget it, imprinted on her brain like a real memory. A blue dog, whimpering, on the rug. As she held Felix, and rocked him, she looked at the dog. Patrizia was contending with Roman, who had locked himself in the bathroom.