A stranger. All that’s left.
“You were married?” asks Brennan.
Once or twice a day he does this, tries to talk about my home, as if his being there made it a shared experience. As if he knows anything. I shake my head, a thunderous effort. I can’t talk about you, I won’t.
We’re sitting beside a fire it took him nearly all evening to build. He’s heating soup or beans, something in a can. It’s been two days since he led me out of the bedroom, down the stairs, through the back door. How I moved I still don’t know.
Brennan glances my way then back to the dirt. “My brother liked zebras growing up,” he says. He’s been telling a lot of stories about his brother. This I allow—white noise. “I was a baby, so I don’t remember, but Mom always talked about it at birthdays and stuff. Everyone else is playing with cowboys and aliens and robots, and Aiden’s drawing stripes on a toy horse he found in the park.”
He pauses to stir whatever’s in the can. The smell is atrocious. Every smell is atrocious. Sap and pine and smoke and death: interchangeable.
“That was her favorite story,” he continues. “I hated it. It made us sound poor, like she couldn’t afford to buy him a toy. We weren’t poor. We weren’t rich, but we weren’t poor. Mom was a paralegal. Aiden was going to go to law school. Mom told him the lawyers always looked tired, so maybe he should become a doctor instead. I thought that was funny.”
He starts peeling the bark off his stir stick. “I didn’t get sick so maybe he didn’t get sick,” he says. “But Mom did, so…then, it’s like, there’s those two guys. So much else that could have happened even if he didn’t get sick, you know? But what if he’s still out there?”
A memory, triggered: I got sick. After the cabin, I got sick. I thought it was from the water, but it wasn’t the water. It was this, whatever this is.
I didn’t quit because they didn’t come; in my delirium, I knew my state couldn’t be as dire as it felt because they were leaving me alone. If I were in danger they would help, I told myself. Turns out no one came because they were all dead, or dying, like I was dying, except that I didn’t die and they all did.
You did.
I cup my face in my hands, block out the world, a world that keeps insisting on its own existence.
When my grandmother died, my father spoke of Heaven for the first time in my memory. A coping mechanism. I saw how this sudden expression of belief helped him disperse his grief. Me, I had the pendant: an oblong opal that shimmered in my palm and reminded me of her wisdom. I don’t remember why I thought my grandmother wise, what she ever said to me. I don’t remember her at all, now, though I remember the love I felt for her.
“I hate it,” says Brennan. “I hate not knowing if Aiden’s alive or not.”
My grandmother’s not in Heaven and neither are you. The energy that coursed through your brain, that made you you, is dispersed now like my father’s grief. The cells that housed that energy are dead, and as they decay they will release the atoms that formed your body, that pumped your blood, that was your blood. I once read that, the way atoms travel over time, everyone alive today likely contains at least one that was once a part of Shakespeare’s body. In this way our ancestors are all one, and one day, your atoms will become everyone. Eventually the atoms that together make my skin, my bones, my marrow, my hair and guts and blood will mingle again with yours. I’ll be like you then, nonexistent and everywhere.
We don’t need Heaven for this to be true. We don’t need God to be together again.
But I wish for it. I wish I could pray, find solace. I wish I could believe that you were still you, more than atoms, watching from above. But I’m done with pretending, with lies and wishful thinking. This leaves me with the truth: You’re gone. I can see you in the bed, gone. I close my eyes and see you, gone. I walk through the cloud around me and see you, inert, preserved—gone. I see your face as I remember, but this vision of you exists only in my imagination. I’ve seen enough to know. Gases, rot, bloating stench. That is what you’ve become and though the flashes come I cannot bear to think of you that way. I will allow myself this final lie: You’re there, like a carving beneath the covers. In this lie I stare until you smile, and then I kiss your forehead good night and turn away to let you sleep.
In the Dark—Week one down. Reactions?
…
[+] submitted 29 days ago by LongLiveCaptainTightPants
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[-] CoriolisAffect 28 days ago
My cameraman friend is dead. Whatever’s happening it got him. The people on the show are fucked. We’re all fucked.
…
24.
When I envision the cabin, alternate visions seem equally true. The house is blue; the house is brown. There are balloons everywhere; there are a handful, scattered. Stacks of blue boxes; a trio of small packages. I want to cut the difference in half, just to stop wondering, but memory shouldn’t be a compromise.
The baby would have died anyway.
That’s what I tell myself, but it doesn’t help and I know it’s not true. Not necessarily. I could have saved him, maybe.
And then what, I’d be walking along this curving parkway with a baby strapped to my chest? An infant with no relation to me. That’s not survival, that’s selflessness, and the only person I’ve ever wanted to give the better half of anything was you.
Why was the welcome mat in the back? We’ve never washed it. Why would you wash it?
Why do I think it matters?
I don’t. I’m distracting myself. I don’t want to distract myself from you. But I have to; my tongue is dry and my stomach empty. You’d tell me to move on and I am. I am. I’m walking, I’m moving. But my feet are dragging; I can’t lift them, thinking about you. And I see Brennan trying, and I think—I think I can’t let him fail.
I came back, Miles. I’m here but you’re gone and I have to go on because I don’t want to but that’s all my body can do. I’m sorry. I’m sorry and I miss you and you’re gone.
I blink away asphalt and look up at the yellow-brown leaves, splashes of clinging green. I used to think autumn was beautiful.
I loved you. You’re gone. I’m sorry.
“Ad tenebras dedi.”
When I level my blurred gaze, Brennan is staring at me, his thumbs tucked under the straps of his zebra-patterned pack.
“Mae?”
I can feel my body wanting to cry, the tightness of my eyes. I think of his brother, his mother, all that he’s lost. He would have saved the baby. He saved me, when all I’d been to him was cruel.
“Where are we going?” I ask.
He’s staring at me. After a moment he replies, “I don’t know.”
A careful tone, because my voice still has tones and I have to choose one and he’s a child. Not accusing, only asking, “You don’t have a plan?”
“Just to get you out of there.” Brennan shifts his pack. “Where do you think we should go?”
Should. A judgment call I’m not qualified to make. But I do know a place, a place Brennan might like.
“It’s far,” I say, “and it’s not a farm, but there’s acreage and a well with a hand pump. A little greenhouse and a couple dozen sugar maples. There were chickens, might still be.” I’m beyond hope, but logic tells me there’s a chance, a legitimate chance, because if there is a genetic component to resistance, I had to get it from somewhere. One or the other. Though it could be recessive, an invisible, unexpressed connection that couldn’t save either of my parents and yet saved me.
“Where is it?” asks Brennan.
“Vermont.”
“Let’s go.”
That’s it: Let’s go. Because he trusts me. Despite everything I’ve done and not done, he trusts me. He keeps trying to save me. He’s trying, so hard.
I can’t let him fail.
—