The Body Farm, page 21
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Hannah opened her eyes. She closed her eyes. There was no difference.
Reality had been blown out like a candle. Her bedroom was gone. She was in the void of space, she thought, still half awake, blinking and blinking. Absolute emptiness, lacking even the stars.
Hannah could not breathe, and then she could. There was air here, that was lucky. How long would it last, though? One lungful, two?
Her hands grabbed for purchase. She discovered fabric, bunches of it. Some part of the universe remained, then. She sucked in another breath. Air flowed easily into her lungs; it did not seem to be running out. She registered the weight of her own body. So gravity persisted. Hannah herself persisted. She was not floating in outer space—that was her pillow under her nape, damp with sweat. Her calves slid against the mattress. She could feel (but not hear) the anxious knock of her heart.
It was not gray; it was not whiteout or darkness—it was absence, blindness, a woman lying on her back in bed, missing four of her five senses, clutching at the mattress for dear life, tethered to the world by touch alone.
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Hannah was lost in her own apartment. Shuffling, arms held out like a sleepwalker, toes gripping the carpet, she could not find the front door. Her shoulder bumped against the lamp in the corner. Her fingers brushed the plane of the window. She turned, trying to locate the wall, and barked her shins on the coffee table. The couch was in the wrong place. Everything was in the wrong place.
Hannah collapsed on the floor, cross-legged like a child, and screamed as loud as she could. She felt her throat scrape, tongue rise, pushing the breath out like a bellows; she was making sound she could not hear. Screamed. Screamed.
A tremor beneath her. The door opening, she hoped, or being broken open. And then hands, other people’s hands, pulling her to her feet.
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Probably a hospital. All Hannah knew for certain was the bed, scratchy sheets, a thin pillow, and a needle taped inside the hollow of her elbow, attached to a plastic tube.
Hands came and went. Doctors and nurses, Hannah assumed. She could not access time; she might have been in that bed for hours or days. Weeks, even. She had never before understood the relief of a clock, the simple but vital ability to quantify the vast, shapeless wash of consciousness. Without time, there was only now, and now was unbearable. Hannah groped for her jugular vein and took her own pulse, just to have something to count. The present moment was torture, but the future was coming, heartbeat by heartbeat.
She tried to picture her surroundings, to give herself the comfort of a mental image at least. She imagined the reek of bleach, the beep of machinery, the murmur of concerned voices. She blinked often, waiting for her sight to come back on like a light switch being flipped. What was more quintessentially human than sight? People said “I see” when they meant “I understand”; it was that primal.
Gradually she came to know the different hands. They changed every so often, according to some tidal rhythm. There were the cold, quick-moving ones, the fingers hard and inhuman. There were the hammy pincers, crushing Hannah’s wrist to find her pulse. There were the slim, kindly ones, which announced their presence in the room each time by squeezing Hannah’s toes through the sheets, then tapping her elbow in a friendly way before examining her IV port and taking her vitals. All the hands wore rubber gloves. Every so often they would do something shocking, like injecting Hannah’s shoulder with a solution that burned like venom. Once a clever, nimble hand settled in the cup of Hannah’s palm and began to change shape, kicking its fingers like a Rockette’s legs. Sign language, she guessed. Helen Keller, she remembered. The hand contorted against her skin for a while as Hannah said aloud, over and over, “I don’t understand.” Eventually the fingers went limp and withdrew.
Sometimes the hands urged her out of bed and pulled her limbs this way and that like a child playing with a doll, stripping off her gown and replacing it with an identical one. They steered her into the bathroom at intervals, controlling her path with a viselike grip on her upper arm. They bathed her with a rough sponge. They gave her trays of food—presumably it was food—which she chewed and swallowed obediently. No smell, no taste, and she could not even see it. She scanned the surface with fluttering fingertips: a carton of milk, a fruit cup, a sandwich. Her tongue, no longer a subtle sensor but a blunt instrument, added few details: some kind of condiment soaking the bread, maybe mayonnaise, maybe mustard, and in the middle a mysterious lukewarm substance that could have been deli meat or fried egg.
And then, without warning, a new hand—gentle, with a dry palm—slipped into hers. A pulse of recognition. Until that moment, Hannah had not believed that she would know her sister’s touch. She had never paid attention to the tenor and quality of Jo’s hands. Why would she? But she was certain—as certain as though she could see Jo’s rosebud mouth, smell her lavender shampoo, hear her husky voice, taste the salt tears that flowed down her own cheeks.
She gripped Jo’s palm in both of hers, and her sister responded in kind.
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Nothing came next. Nothingness, rather. One morning, or afternoon, it was impossible to tell, Hannah lay with two fingers against her throat, counting her pulse. It was daytime, she thought, because of the heat on one side of her face, probably from a window, sunlight through glass, though it could have been an electric light, a trick. Hands came, taking away the lunch tray, adjusting the sheets with a tug and tuck, and patting Hannah’s shoulder in a reassuring manner—or maybe not, maybe it was just a tactile good-bye, offering no comfort, only communication.
The nurse’s hands left, and then the heat. Had the sun dipped behind a cloud?
And what about the bed, that reliable presence, the last sure thing in the universe, pressing always against her back? Where had it gone?
Her fingers still lay against her jugular, but there was no pulse. She could not feel her throat with her hand; she could not feel her hand with her throat.
She had the sensation of falling, as in a dream, a lurch into empty space.
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During that time, that timeless time, Hannah was locked inside her own flesh. Her internal sensors still functioned, but her skin, the largest organ in the body, as she had learned in grade school, provided no information. When she patted the bed, her finger bones spread apart, the muscles inside her palm tightened, but there was no answering touch from the mattress. When she sucked in a breath, she felt her lungs open, but when she blew out hard through her nose, there was no corresponding tickle against her lips. She had evidence of her own existence, but nothing beyond her body could be verified. The tiny pilot was marooned in ghastly solitude.
The many hands of the doctors and nurses, even her own sister, had abandoned her. Probably they were still there, unfelt, restraining her as she thrashed, trying to connect with something, to launch herself out of bed and slam into the floor, to find the wall with her fist; she would break bone if it meant contact. Maybe they strapped her down. Certainly they sedated her. She could feel it happen, the syrupy, somnolent warmth spreading through her bloodstream from one shoulder.
Sleep was a balm, the same as ever; her senses bloomed there. She dreamed of sitting in her father’s lap as a child, scraping her forehead against his beard. She dreamed of baking with her mother, side by side in the kitchen, licking the cookie dough off the spoon in flagrant disregard of doctors’ recommendations. “If this is what kills me,” her mother said, “tell them I died doing what I loved.” Hannah dreamed of running down a hill with Jo, young and strong, breathless with glee. She dreamed of the icy cocoon of the MRI machine. “Here’s the problem,” the doctor said, handing her a scan of her brain, a translucent sheet of black that showed the chalky bowl of her skull, which held not lobes and neurons but a doll-sized figure, its bones shining white, its posture contorted, waving in panic, signaling to be rescued.
Waking up was an emergency, every time. Hannah shrieked without sound and flailed without contact. “Let me die,” she roared silently. “Kill me!” But they did not, would not. They only sedated her again and again, lulling her back into the warm bath of sleep, where the solace of memory and dream awaited her, overlapping and melting into one—dreams as true as memories, memories as immersive as dreams.
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On a balmy, sun-swept morning, Jo enters the hospital for the first time in months. Vaccinated and boosted, she is no longer in danger from the virus, so the CDC says. Still, she wears a mask, mostly out of habit. For months, as hundreds of thousands of people died across the country, Jo donned a mask every morning, then slipped masks onto the delicate faces of her children, checked the straps, and pinched the folds of foil tight over their noses, as regular as prayer.
At the welcome desk, a pimply young man takes her temperature by scanning her wrist with a laser.
“I’m going to see my sister,” Jo tells him. He nods absently.
For months, the hospital has been besieged, running out of beds, running out of ventilators. No visitors have been allowed in, not even the partners of women in labor. Jo has called and called, annoying the nurses, who have more important things to do than report the same thing every day: “No change, she’s sedated now.”
Sometimes Jo wished that she could be sedated too. When she woke in the morning already counting the hours until she could go back to bed, when the death count was always the headline of the day, when her husband was too sick to stand up and her children were too antsy to sit still for remote learning, when Jo was slated to lead virtual meetings while her youngest was running around naked, heedless of the camera on her mother’s laptop, when the house descended into such an alarming state of filth that Jo would have called child services had she encountered it at someone else’s place, when her boss was on a ventilator, when her father-in-law died of the virus, when the world shrank and darkened to a pinpoint, no light at the end of the tunnel, only more of the same, absent of joy, absent of hope, Jo needed her sister. So much happened while Hannah lay in the hospital, more alone, it seemed, than any human has ever been.
At the door to her sister’s room, Jo pauses. Not knowing what else to do, she knocks. She is not sure what she will encounter inside—a wasted shell, riddled with bedsores, prematurely aged, fingernails overlong, hands gnarled? How much of Hannah is left?
There is a nurse in the room, changing the IV bag. Jo was not expecting to see anyone else. She waves, and he waves back, dressed in bright-blue scrubs.
Oh, Hannah. As thin as she was in her childhood, “all bones,” their mother used to say. Elbows wider than her upper arms. Her beesting breasts, so like Jo’s, have shrunk to mere suggestion, a prepubescent swell. Someone has been washing her hair, which shines and curls around her throat, oddly luxurious. Her expression is peaceful. She is pale, so pale, as ashen and still as a porcelain doll.
“How is she?” Jo asks.
The nurse shrugs. “There might have been some new activity on the last scan. I don’t know. She’s not usually one of mine. I’ll tell Dr. Alves you’re here.”
He rustles out of the room.
Jo takes a seat by the bed. She entwines her fingers through Hannah’s, hoping against hope for an answering squeeze. Last time, Hannah clung to her like a lifeline. This time, however, her sister’s hand is limp, and Jo must make do with the reassuring fact of bodily warmth, proof of life.
“It’s time to wake up,” Jo says. “You have to wake up now.”
In truth, the whole world is waking up. Jo’s children are back in school—thrilled to be dropped off each morning, waving good-bye like teenagers heading off to a rave. Her husband is back at the office, thank god. Jo loves to miss him, to miss the kids. Absence is necessary to affection, she understands now. Her work has stayed remote, which she does not mind. After school, she takes her children to the park, the zoo, the beach. Outdoors is better, the CDC says. The virus is not gone, the CDC says. Before the pandemic, Jo did not even know what the acronym stood for, but now she quotes the CDC’s pronouncements in everyday conversations, as though they are old friends. She cries often these days, sometimes from relief at seeing her children laugh on the playground, shaking off the caution they have absorbed like oxygen during the pandemic, and sometimes due to an emotion Jo cannot quite name—a kind of uncurling, the tears she could not shed when things were at their worst now finally released.
One day Hannah will learn all these things. She will learn what she missed. Her senses will return, Jo is sure. She cannot contemplate the other possibility, the outcome that is not recovery. One day, she and her sister will fall into each other’s arms again. They will leave this hospital together, stepping into the world with the raw astonishment of newborns, overwhelmed and delighted by every sensation, the flicker of sunlight through the leaves, the distant smoke of a barbecue, the hiss of bicycle wheels on pavement. Changed by what they have endured, stripped down to their essentials, they will revel in the simple, honest gift of the world the way it has always been.
Jo wipes her eyes, then goes to the window and opens it, letting in a gust of clean air. The sky is papered over with gray, the wind humid and slow. A droplet strikes the glass. It has not rained in weeks, a rare dry spell that appears to be drawing to a close. The clouds darken, coalescing.
There is a sound from the room behind her. Three sharp sniffs. Jo recognizes the noise as one of her sister’s unique quirks. Hannah would do that, sniff sniff sniff, when the aroma of pancakes wafted up the stairs, when their mother wore too much perfume, when their father brought home flowers as a surprise. Not one, not two, always three inhalations, canine in their quickness.
Jo turns, hardly daring to believe. Hannah’s eyes are closed, but one hand—yes, one hand has begun to twitch. The fingers swivel like the fronds of an anemone in a strong current. The elbow bends.
Another droplet smacks against the glass. The smell is overpowering, mud and stone, promise and renewal. As Jo watches, trembling all over, her sister lifts a hand to her mouth. Hannah touches her thumb against her fingertips and unfolds the palm. Her muscles are atrophied, but the gesture is unmistakable, a perfect imitation of their mother’s joyous, reverent chef’s kiss.
And then Hannah speaks, her voice weak, just one word. But Jo cannot hear it over the roar of the sky opening, the sudden, wild music of the rain.
The Body Farm
It began with a letter. At least, that’s when it began for me. I worked the night shift and came home weary. The house was dark and silent when I pulled up in front. The sun rose bloody that morning, as though it knew what was coming. Heavy clouds soaked up the crimson light like a bandage over an injury.
I entered the house on tiptoe, listening for movement. You weren’t awake yet, my beautiful boys, four years old then. The mail lay scattered around my feet, pushed through the slot in the door sometime before dawn. I gathered it all up, noting absently that among the bills and catalogs was an electric-blue envelope of thick card stock, addressed to Beatrice. A yowl signaled the arrival of the cats, the only ones awake, three night-black silhouettes twining around my ankles. I stacked the mail on the kitchen counter with the blue envelope on top. I didn’t give it another thought as I went upstairs.
Beatrice was sound asleep in our king-sized bed in her usual pose, flat on her belly with her knees bent and shins lifted in the air. I have never seen anyone else sleep like that. Once I took pictures to show the friends who did not believe me, but Beatrice made me delete them.
I went to check on you. Technically you had separate rooms, but you always slept together. That morning you were tangled in a heap of sand-brown limbs in Theo’s bed. I lingered in the doorway, watching you dream, Lucas’s feet twitching, Theo snoring delicately. The sky brightened by the second. Soon your eyes would open at precisely the same moment, and at once you would both be talking, updating each other on your dreams, wondering what to have for breakfast, and continuing your ongoing, interminable debate about which one of you the cats loved more. There is no foggy transition between states of mind for children that age: one minute out cold, the next entirely awake.
As I stood in the doorway, the exhaustion of my long night fell over me. I staggered back down the hall and collapsed into bed beside my wife, dozing off as the house woke around me.
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You did not know much about my work then. This was fine by me. If asked, you would both report that I did “science”—Lucas thickening the s’s with his adorable lisp. The specifics of my job were not important to you. You were scarcely out of your toddlerhood, sapling-skinny boys with identical crooked grins. Your existence revolved around the central hub of our house, our yard, your toys, and the cats. You knew that Beatrice (Mommy) stayed home with you, reading books about dinosaurs, making play dough from scratch, and kissing away your “boo-boos,” real or imagined. You knew that I (Mama) went to work and then came back again. What I did out there in the world, away from you, was inconsequential and vague. Your biggest concern about my job was that I always smelled like antiseptic when I returned. You both refused to get in my lap until I’d been home for a few hours, enough time to accrue the odor of cats and curry from dinner and a residue of Beatrice’s perfume.
At that time, I had worked at the Body Farm for nearly ten years. The official name is the Anthropological Research Center, but nobody ever calls it that. From the outside, the place is intentionally anonymous. A flat concrete building. A bland, unspecific name. There’s nothing else nearby—no offices, certainly nothing residential, just a blank strip of highway forty miles north of Lyle, Iowa, our hometown.
Visitors to the Body Farm are limited to the occasional police detective or forensic anthropologist. Sometimes teenagers from Lyle sneak over at night to see if the stories are true, but these would-be oglers inevitably find themselves stymied by the high concrete walls and motion-activated lights. Honestly, the smell alone is usually enough to deter them.
