A Better World, page 11
“Did Anouk recite her stupid poem?”
“ ‘The Inheritors,’ ” Linda answered. There was a divider between the front and back seats, and the two cops didn’t seem to have any interest in what was happening. This, Linda decided, was good.
“She’s a penis face,” Gal said. “Takes after her brother-baby-daddy. She wrote her own biography. That’s why it’s so long. It’s longer than her grandfather’s, and he invented Omnium. She writes all the brochures, too. That’s why they’re so useless.”
Linda had the presence of mind to recognize that openly criticizing Anouk Parson was a very bad idea. “Penises are very unexpected. They’re like if you’re in the woods and a leprechaun jumps out.”
“They act like they’re on your side around here, but they’re not,” Gal said. It was as if they were having separate conversations with their ghost selves. “They used to watch my kids in the river. They’d tell me they saw them, that they were great swimmers. But the river’s poison and I had no idea. Nobody told me. Can you believe that?” Gal asked, kicking the seat.
Linda was trying hard not to vomit. This drive was lasting too long, and they were headed in the opposite direction from her house. Why had she told them to drop Gal first? Why was she always such a goddamned martyr?
“It’s hard to help people. You don’t have to tell me. I tried with my kids. I made all the offerings on my altar and none of them worked,” Gal said, seemingly in response to her own internal thoughts. “But what if Hollow’s all a lie? Birds are just birds and kids just get sick?”
“What’s Hollow got to do with sick kids?”
“You’re a dummy,” Gal said. “Dummy, dummy, dummy.”
Linda felt the heave in her stomach, the deep pockets of sour in the back of her mouth. Dear God, they weren’t here three months yet, and she was about to vomit in a cop car in the middle of the night.
The driver, a wet-behind-the-ears kid, pulled over. They parked in front of a small one-bedroom house surrounded by other small houses. A siren sounded in her mind: Had they left Plymouth Valley? Crossed the border? Would she be allowed back in? But then she saw the tall, unscalable wall just behind. This was the southwestern town limit, where retired people, floating temps, and the lowest-level executives lived.
Linda moved with deliberateness, performing her best approximation of sobriety. She was outside, even though this wasn’t her stop. But moving felt good. She waved at the cops. For an instant, they looked too small and too human inside their metal chassis cage. Her mind played a trick, and the cage was made of caladrius bones.
“I’ll walk from here! Thank you!”
The guy on the passenger side rolled down his window. He was young enough still to have a peach fuzz beard. “Are you sure, Dr. Farmer?”
Linda nodded, afraid to open her mouth. Acid had climbed up her stomach to her throat.
Gal was beside her, pressing a nauseatingly warm hand between her shoulder blades. “She’s fine! She’ll be fine. We’re besties!”
The cops pulled away. Headlights shined down the empty street and were gone. Linda kept it in. She waited until everything was dark. Then came the heave.
* * *
“Don’t walk home. It’s so far! Stay here. I have a fresh sourdough. You need something to soak it all up.”
Linda was standing over the scene of the crime—a grotesque replay of her evening’s choices deposited on Gal Parker’s narrow front lawn. She felt better, though. More present. “What time is it?”
“Too late to wake your hubby. Come inside. You can wash up in my toilet room,” Gal said. No smart lights bloomed, so Linda could see only her silhouette. She was at her front door, using a metal key instead of her palm for entrance. Low tech.
Linda looked down the dark street. It stretched long and unfamiliar. She was tired and thirsty. How far was home? Three kilometers? More? A caladrius on the lawn had gone statue still as if sleeping, but its eyes were open.
Did these creepy fuckers sleep with open eyes?
Inside, Gal flicked a low-light lamp that colored the room a sickly brownish yellow. “Sit!” she said, and Linda landed on a funky plaid couch that was, somehow, warm. The air was cold. The house was cold. Almost as cold as outside.
“I’ll just go check on the kids,” Gal said.
Linda squeezed her hands into fists, her fingers swollen from dehydration. Small children whispered. She didn’t hear what they said, only their sleepy kid voices, and Gal’s surprisingly soothing words of comfort: Rest, babies. Momma’s home.
Things weren’t spinning anymore, which was good, but the room was wrong. There were crucifixes nailed to all the walls. Some hung upside down, others sideways. In the corner, on a midwall-height altar, was one of those Virgin Marys on the half shell. Stuffed bunny rabbits and bears were bent down in worship before it. But she was seeing it wrong. Had to be. It was some kind of play structure the kids had designed. Kids go through weird pagan stages when they’re little. They’re always making shrines in their pretend-play and would be all the more likely to do so in a town like this.
…Right?
There was medicine everywhere, too. Pills and vials, some empty and some half-full. Bleary, she lifted a used syringe and vial off the foot table. The contents were identifiable: Zovolotecan, a chemotherapeutic agent that had been prescribed a lot when she’d been in medical school but had lost favor with the discovery of more targeted drugs. The drug was made out to both children: Katherine Parker and Sebastian Parker.
She knew they were sick, but cancer? How could they both have it? She replaced the vial and syringe as Gal returned with a tray holding bread, plates, glasses, a bottle of aspirin, and a jug of water.
Gal poured the water, handed it to Linda with two aspirin. Then she sat across from her, in a grease-stained wingback chair.
“Feeling better?” Gal asked, newly cheerful and alert. But the whites of her eyes were veiny red.
Linda didn’t feel better, but she nodded politely. “Do your children have cancer?” she asked.
“They’re calling it idiopathic leukemia,” she said.
“Both kids?” Linda asked as she gulped the water and aspirin. Something was wrong. It tasted like diluted alcohol. But it couldn’t be alcohol. Who would do that? She put the nearly empty glass down. “Is this water?”
Gal lifted her own glass and sipped. “I spiked it with some grain to keep us from sugar-crashing. You’ll have less of a hangover.”
“Grain alcohol?” Linda asked. That wasn’t possible. She’d heard wrong. “That’s crazy. You’re crazy. I could die.”
“It’s what we all do here. You don’t know anything,” Gal said with irritation.
Linda tried to stand. Her legs felt unsteady, as if their bones were a cluster of loosely tied sticks.
“Oh, fine!” Gal said. She jerked Linda’s glass from her hand, returned shortly with it filled, along with a new jug.
“Water?” Linda asked.
“Water!”
Linda drank deeply, refilled. Drank two more like this. Went slow on glass number four, then peeled away a hunk of bread from the loaf. It was stale, a white funk about its crust. Maybe it had been fresh, but not recently. Linda ate around that funk, trying to soak the acid in her stomach.
Across, Gal watched. Her jagged, purple bruise had grown. It seeped across the goose-pimpled side of her upper arm. “God sent you,” she said. “You’re going to help me.”
A laser of logic burned through the swirling dross. “I don’t think that’s true,” Linda said, and then she couldn’t remember why she’d said it. Couldn’t remember what they’d been talking about. Then the laser was gone, and everything was churn, and yes, that first glass of water really had been diluted grain alcohol, because it was weaving into her bloodstream.
“You hate them, just like me,” Gal’s voice exclaimed, and though Linda was repelled by the high-pitched sound, she held tight to it. Don’t float away, she thought. Stay awake or something very bad will happen.
“That’s a staggering extrapolation,” she answered, her words slurring. Staggerin’ strapolation. This house wasn’t just cold; the air had a spark of something. It was off, like someone bleeding out on a table after a gunshot. “Why’s it so cold? Don’t they maintain your solar panels?”
“I used to live in your house before Trish left,” Gal said, as if in answer to the question. “I had a car just like yours. Everyone here is the same. They come for the same reasons. They stay for the same reasons. But it changes you. Every day you’re here, you become something else.”
Linda stopped chewing. “My house was your house?”
“Sunset Heights. Great view from the top of that hill.”
Linda felt a swell of unease, but it was hard to remember why she felt it. On the floor, pieces of things: A xylophone without the mallets. A model barnyard missing the top of the barn. A doll wearing a shirt and no pants, her hair cut short. Those upside-down crosses.
“Since we’re friends now, I want to be honest. I left my kids alone tonight. I leave a lot. Since Trish did what she did, it’s too hard for me to look at them.”
“Are they okay?” Linda asked.
“Plymouth Valley either digests people or spits them out.”
“But they’re warm enough?” Linda asked. She considered looking in on the children. But in her condition and at this time of night, she would only frighten them. And she’d heard them just before, doing their primary job, which was breathing.
“Cozy. Sleeping,” Gal answered. “They’re four and six, but they’re super mature.”
“That’s too young to leave them alone,” Linda said.
“Shut up, you dum-dum-dummy,” Gal answered, terse, but without anger.
Linda chewed more bread, but it really tasted off. She was thinking of Poughkeepsie. Houses during the height of the bad times had smelled stale like this. Thirty years later, Poughkeepsie still hadn’t recovered. Orphans had grown up and made more orphans. “I should go.”
“Stay,” Gal pleaded. “Just for a little bit.”
Linda thought that seemed like a bad idea, but she wasn’t ready to stand.
Gal came over and sat down beside her. She patted Linda’s hand, and when Linda didn’t react, she took and held it. She felt warm and sticky like an over-napped toddler. The digital clock on the wall read 1:34 a.m. In Linda’s mind, that awful shadow, the hidden thing with beady eyes, was shambling a path up from the shelter, through broken Poughkeepsie and drowning Kings, to here, this room. It was stalking the halls, hungry.
“Same car. Same house. Same scientist spouse. We’re so practically the same person that we should have the same name.” Gal’s eyes were bleary red. She leaned into Linda, pressed her soft cheek into the crook of her neck. Her body went limp, its hot weightiness pinning Linda to the sunken couch.
“I’m you. Let me be you?” Gal asked.
“Nah,” Linda said. “Get off.”
Gal squeezed her hand one more time. She was still close enough that Linda could see her clean, deep pores and smell her specific human scent: honey and stale hops, like the floor of a rarely cleaned bar. “They think I’m stupid, but they don’t know,” she said, back to that performative baby talk. “If I have to sacrifice, they do, too. It’ll be their kids who suffer just like mine.”
With the grain, everything was starting to spin again. In the sick, yellow light, all the broken things danced to a silent beat, the air bending and retracting with a wonk wonk wonk. “I don’t like it here and I’m worried about your children. I want to go home,” Linda said.
Gal’s answer seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere, a disembodied voice: “You’re not so pretty. I could hurt you, too.”
She noticed, again, the rabbits paying homage to the Virgin Mary. Upon closer inspection, Mary’s face was ground down and over the smooth white of it, someone had glued a beak.
With dim, dawning horror, Linda looked to Gal, whose mascara had run, chunks of putty-colored sleep caking the caruncles of her eyes. She grinned a terrible grin, and Linda thought, insanely, of that children’s story about monsters on an island, with terrible claws and terrible teeth.
“I’m going to break this town and everyone in it.” The walls closed in. The upside-down crosses and altar bent closer, like the air itself were buckling. She noticed that the pants-less Barbie’s eyes had been scratched out, leaving two hollows. Gal was changed, too. She wasn’t sweet or cute. She was rotten. “It’s the only way, you rich, dumb cunt with your smart husband and your big house and your perfect life. My life. You took my life.” The baby talk was gone. It was the voice of someone completely fucking different.
“I have to go,” Linda said.
Gal’s soft, full face scrunched with rage. Most people only ever made that expression in private, if they made it at all.
Linda looked for her purse and coat and oh, dear God, thank you God, they were beside her on this sunken, crumbly couch. “I’m sorry. I have to go.”
“Everyone’s so sorry,” Gal answered in the semidark, her eyes half open, her skin ashen as lifeless wrapping. “Get the fuck out.”
* * *
Outside, Linda couldn’t find her device in her purse or pockets. Without it, she had no map. No way to call for help. Just go, she thought. Run.
Landmarks. The wall marked the westernmost part of town. If she walked east and toward the hillside, she’d find her way.
The streetlights had gone soft, making the hedges bordering most of the houses appear animated and alive, so she left the curb, went straight down the middle of the road, her shoes padding softly, her purse strung over her shoulder and tucked close. She looked back once at Gal’s house. It hunkered glumly in the half dark, its old wood creaking and slanted, its dull façade a mean grit. A nightmare house.
* * *
An hour later, the houses were bigger and prettier. In the gloam, it was hard to tell which was hers. But this was Sunset Heights, the number was nine. Sunny was out of her shelter, her sharp beak retracting from a small burrow in the ground beside a slate stepping stone. She returned with a furry, moving thing clenched between her teeth.
Sunny chomped (a vole? a mouse?) until the poor thing went still. Jaw locked, the bird glared at Linda. Everything felt quiet. Like a lacuna in time, where all the world was frozen, except for Linda and this malignant witness.
“Go,” she whispered, remembering, then, the shambling thing at the bottom of the shelter.
Sunny stayed. Her process was surprisingly graceful. She tore the creature in half, and it was gone in two swallows, her neck undulating.
“I’ll go,” Linda said.
Palm recognition took two efforts. Once inside, she headed for the kitchen, guzzled a liter of water like it was a two-ounce shot. Her headache eased like loosened shrink-wrap. She drank another half liter, and added some aspirin, calcium carbonate, and a sprinkle of salt. Finished that and poured one more half liter. Stomach sloshing, she carried it with her.
“Better,” she muttered.
Up the stairs. In the dark, she didn’t remember the location of the dresser or bed. She left her clothing in a pile, felt with blind hands until she knocked against the mattress, bruising her arm (like Gal. Same arm, same car, same house. Was that real? Had that happened?). She climbed in, where Russell was zonked.
Sleep didn’t come. She was thinking of the nightmare house. She was thinking about all the lost people in the world, the disappeared people whose numbers were swelling large as the seas. It had happened with her patients. They’d come every few months, then they’d stop showing up, their devices disconnected. She’d lost acquaintances, too. One day, riddled with sham optimism, they were telling you about a job prospect or a move to a different part of the city that they were sure would reverse their fortunes, and the next, they were gone.
Thoughts spinning, she couldn’t stand being alone with them. She shook Russell’s bare shoulder. “I’m home,” she said.
He pulled her in and kissed her. Water sloshing, head light and dizzy, it wasn’t tentative. It wasn’t shy. They made sloppy, unbridled love.
“Did it go okay?” he asked when they were done.
She’d tell him about Gal later. She’d tell him about the nightmare house, and the way it had reminded her of being a little kid back in Poughkeepsie, trapped in strange places without the agency or words to extricate herself. She’d tell him that she wanted to go back and check on those kids. For now, she said, “Complicated. But we might be able to stay.”
* * *
Later, sirens rang out, but these seemed far west and outside the walls. She fell asleep believing their source arose from a distant tragedy, unrelated to her.
PRIMARY SOURCES: An Excavation of the Past
What people forget about those times before the Plymouth Valley disaster is that the fear was real. You could cut it with a knife. It wasn’t just the nukes—those were too freaky to fathom. I mean, somebody zonked Iran. Like, erased an entire city, made half the country radioactive. We were all just waiting for the next one. That’s some existential shit. But the everyday stuff was worse. You couldn’t count on the weather or your car or your lights. If you lived in a basement in a waterfront city, you’d damn well better have an evac plan, or your whole family could drown. You know how people are nice now? All, tra-la-la, let’s cooperate? Well, it wasn’t like that then. We were too scared to be nice. We all knew something was coming—an earth-eradicating disease, or a nuke, or just famine, you know? One day we’d go to the store and there wouldn’t be any food on the shelves. That happened. People forget, but it happened. Your money wasn’t worth anything. Your bank wasn’t a bank. Some days, no matter what you had to offer, you couldn’t get clean water or bread. You know how, if you feed rats intermittently, they go crazy, because they can’t stand not being able to predict what’s going to happen? We were like rats. It was excruciating.
