Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

—

What Poppy remembers as she runs up the stairs: the assault in the black room. Worse than she had experienced it at the time. At the time, the brain detached, protected, dissociated. As she runs up the stairs and her legs hurt she feels the deep bite of a mouth on her thigh. She feels the stiff grip of a hand around her neck. She feels the burn of the pills. The salty stabbing in her mouth. The metallic taste of liquid down her throat. The knees grip her head. The wild robots lunge and howl. The bite, the grip, the stab. This is what she remembers on the stairs.

—

It’s there, running up the stairs, that she finally knows what has happened to her. She sees that her life has been deranged. She sees that it has always been deranged, but that she had not previously understood how mad, and had never realized how it was not she who had been insane but her circumstances. And now those circumstances, of birth, of environment, of place, of love, had caused a craziness to infiltrate her too. For her the madness of her everyday life had been mundane until recently when it had taken on the quality of death. Of an afterlife existing within this life. The insanity had been hidden for so long by money, by structure, by society, by walls. No one had seemed to notice. The lack of awareness seemed to her at this moment like a wall of steel that had hidden from view the obvious truths. Maybe someone had once told her to run away, but how could she have run away from everything she knew? Everything she loved? There had always been people in her life, all her life, who had been crazier than she, loving her, distracting her, enjoying her because of what they described as her wit, her inspiring intelligence, her superb, indefatigable sense of style. And it had been love, but not the love she had needed.

—

She doesn’t know precisely when the image of despair became burned in her brain but it was at some point on the stairs. It’s the image of her mother, rising, tubes dangling from every orifice, fighting off the wild robots in the dark room. Death against death. A battle to the end. As she runs up the stairs Poppy is running toward that image. She isn’t afraid. She is running, reaching toward that image. Then it vanishes. Even death disintegrates before her eyes. The vanishing of that image is the image of despair.

—

For her it was when she reached the parking lot, that ugly expanse, cars randomly assembled, the slow reverse of a vehicle backing up and gently turning and driving away, that she had cried. She’d wept without caring if anyone saw her because she was crying tears of release. Not happiness. Not joy. Not yet. Simply tears of release.

—

Around her, the scene of the strip mall, the signs, the letters on the signs, their significant fonts each representing a type of promise, and the cars, one by one pulling away as if by a tide, or standing still, left on the beach, all around her the scene melted into a vision of nature. And as she stood there she turned around and with her mind she let a great gray arcing shield of water rise up, crest, foaming white horses running away, and crash down on the stores, the cars, the parking lot.

—

She would have to do this many times over the course of her life, many thousands of times, before the scene was wiped away.

—

When Poppy stops turning she sees that the wave in her mind is, outside of her mind, a fire. A real fire. Neva shoves her in the car and drives away.

—

The fire burned for thirty hours. No one seemed to know who started it. By the time the firefighters arrived almost everyone had left the scene. It had begun in the basement. They thought they had it under control but then the floor collapsed. The local papers contradicted one another on the exact timing of the fire, but they all agreed that no one was hurt.

HE HAD OWED them a lot of money and so he had offered her to them, not directly, not in a way that she could prove, but that’s what he’d done. And they had taken her. Why wouldn’t they? They had dropped her off at the hotel in case she had been needed. When she hadn’t been — needed — they had driven her in the van to the spa and had been waiting for the drugs to take full effect. She had not yet been used. Not in the way they had intended. She had been able to identify them in pictures but they were never found. At least the other girls had gotten away.

—

It’s always the middle of the night. Buried underground and then clawing her way out. Dirt in her mouth, the distinct grit, the taste of wet soil. In the nightmare she is trying to speak but the earth blocks her words. Dry fragments, insects, crawling to the back of her throat. She coughs up a spray of particulate world. She vomits mud.

—

She gets up in her sleep and walks to the window. She pushes away the drapes and puts her palms on the glass. She is standing in a T-shirt and loose pants, facing the city, hands splayed against the night. Felix is watching from the doorway, the low light from the hall outlining his boy frame. What is it? he says. Why are you screaming?

She turns around. She can feel the mud sliding down her chin, her neck, sticking to her nightgown.

Why are you opening the window?

She widens her mouth but cannot speak.

—

It was a long time before she could speak to anybody. Especially to Ian. In dreams he stroked her hair, and then disintegrated into night. She cried for Steve. She cried for everyone.

—

Once in those nights of underground dreams she had left the apartment, walked along the quiet streets, and gone to the park. She lay on the grass like a beggar or a dog and listened to the end-of-summer birds as the sun was rising. They argued and debated like philosophers who had no better place to be. She had no place else to be. She felt the cold ground. She scratched through the vivid-green grass and dug up a black clump. She put it in her mouth. It tasted like the dirt in her dreams, but slightly sweet. She felt the sharp blades of grass pressing against her T-shirt. She kicked off her sneakers and pushed her bare feet against the dewy hill. She rolled back and forth, back and forth, over the wet grass, attempting to press herself back into the earth.

—

When she finally agreed to see Ian he explained. He had decided the night when he had told Alix everything, the night before Steve died, that he would tell her. Tell her all of it, in spite of Steve, in spite of what he’d made Ian sign. Papers did not matter. Only she mattered, he explained. She was his child.

—

She had already had to comprehend so much that this new knowledge was simply another blow that she had to absorb. She took it in. She held it. She was horrified, amazed, unbelieving. He explained that it was the reason he had ended it between them, and had he known what would happen to her as a result he would never have done it that way. He would have told her that first night he had known. He would go back and change everything if he could. He would spend the rest of his life making it up to her.

—

The rest of his life. Was that a long time? Or not that long? Time had taken on a new meaning. Time was eternity, perceived in little bits. The rest of their lives was a long time and it was nothing.

—

You’re a survivor, he said to her across the table.

A survivor? She said she didn’t feel that she’d survived.

You have.

Barely.

You will.

Please.

I will do anything.

There isn’t anything for you to do.

There must be something I can do.

Like what? Give me back my youth? My sanity? My self?

The steam from her tea had stopped rising. Her hands wrapped around the cold cup. She tried to look at him for moments at a time but her eyes would drift, or dart, to the side, looking at the spot where the wall met the window, or focusing on the back of someone’s nodding head. She felt a burden, a pressure to explain herself to him. At the same time, she felt it was impossible to explain herself. This only added to her feeling of desperation, of futility.