PATRIZIA RECEIVED the call from Poppy while at the reproductive endocrinologist’s office. She was having some blood work done. Checking hormones. She answered the phone with one hand while the other stuck out to the side, arm straight on the armrest, tourniquet tightened, bright red filling the tube like fresh paint being poured. She listened only half attentively, part of her watching the nature program playing on the far wall across the room, baby penguins, baby elephants, baby lions, a part of her focusing on her breath to take her mind off of the puncture, part of her noticing the slight bump in the abdomen of the nurse and wondering if the nurse was pregnant and then part of her managing her jealousy, her sinking hopes, her calculation of how old the nurse must be—probably thirty tops—and then silently wishing her luck while not knowing, really, if the nurse was actually pregnant. All this transpired while she listened to Poppy haltingly explain that she would be spending the night, and probably the weekend, at her friend’s house and that’s where she’d been yesterday and she was so sorry she hadn’t called but only e-mailed earlier to explain.
Which friend? Patrizia asked, with vigor. She was trying to assume a more disciplinarian demeanor after having completely overlooked last night’s indiscretion.
Jas…Jasmine, Poppy said. Jasmine Carpenter.
Carpenter? Who’s that?
She’s new this year. She’s been over to the house but I don’t think you’ve met her.
Where does she live?
In Brooklyn. Far.
What neighborhood? Patrizia asked, rolling her sleeve back down.
Yeah, she’s new, Poppy said. She’s brilliant. A math genius. I’ve got to go. I have a class.
Poppy, I asked you what neighborhood.
Patrizia was ushered into a dimly lit examination room. As the door closed and she prepared to undress from the waist down and put her feet in the stirrups for a sonogram, she said: Text me later with Jasmine’s number. Steve will want to know where you are. Poppy, will you please remember to do that?
They’d already made Poppy end the call and taken back her phone.
She forgets how she got here. Already the elevated subway ride, the burning fires on the plains, are less than a memory, have receded into irretrievable negative space. She forgets how she got from the station to this corpse of a house, its innards in ruins, wires falling, swinging from the ceiling, boards loose, a black mold metastasizing along the wall. That the world goes on in a place like this is incomprehensible. Then it isn’t. It is more than possible. Now she knows a new pain, can’t tell if it is a return of many old pains or something actually new, but it seems new, a never-before-experienced desire to die purely as a way out.
If Steve were here he would see his empire—so crafted, so controlled—attacked at its most damaging and personally hurtful point. A sleek animal shot in its soft eye.
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.