23.
Open them wider, Gabriel. I want to memorize them.” I stare into Gabriel’s irises, the swirling constellations there. “I have to remember exactly what your eyes look like.”
His smell is the forest just after rain. I tickle the grooves of his hips, count the freckles on his arms. We are naked; our hands have no age. My hair, golden, shivers against my hips. No longer made of blood and skin and bone but of shimmering light.
“I’ll just stare into the sun, Elle,” Gabriel replies. “And go blind.”
“But the woods are watching us,” I say. “Remember?”
Gabriel sings, his voice traveling away from our bodies like the wind. And then the sun burns out. Gabriel is gone. There are no trees here. It is the sea undone. The ghosts of leaves whisper near my ear. Three owls swoop inches away from me, their wings brushing against my face. I have never seen this desert; I have never seen the end.
Ethel screams. Her voice melts this place, turns everything back to ocean. Is your heart quiet? Gabriel’s face, a pale moon in the dark waves. There is too much water. It lashes against my calves. I can’t swim. I can’t swim. Where is the rope? Gabriel! I scream.
“Don’t you let go, Elle,” Ethel murmurs. “Ambulance is almost here.” My room on Lyra reconfigures itself around me. She holds my hand, squeezes it. My mouth is parched like the hard desert, covered in graves. A machine crashes in the yard.
“What is?” I manage to ask. I had been dreaming of . . .
“Look, the hospital men came in a helicopter!” Ethel says. The sound of men’s voices, then boom boom boom boom, this music of the last days of the world. The children are crying, footsteps on the stairs. Three pills per day, not two, the world is a kingdom of blue. The rope slipped out of my hands. It just slipped. The steel is so cold. White fluorescence. Madera’s face. I’m wearing a blue gown. The nurses won’t be quiet. That woman in here yesterday should just be euthanized. There’s no hope for her. Let the Lord bless her and keep her. Ladies. Ladies. No chitchat until after the anesthesia is in. Hand me the mouth guard, Ms. Johnson. I had the rope in my grip and then . . . Gabriel, I don’t know how to swim, you know that. Count backward from ten, Mrs. Ranier. Nine, eight, seventeen . . . There was this light on your face. You, asleep in my lap. Light doesn’t age, doesn’t feel time. The hospital lamp burns skull white, the sound of bees, soreness at the temple, my brain, my bones, no, I can’t feel my body, I can’t feel my body! Mrs. Ranier, are you awake? Your therapy is finished for today. How do you feel?
“Do you think she had a stroke?” one of the men asks Ethel, then he picks me up and lays me down on a stretcher.
“You’re the doctor, ain’t you?” Ethel responds.
“Holy shit,” one of the men cries. My head falls to the left. An oak tree splits as if it’s been struck. There is no weather but the helicopter hurling wind around the yard.
“Can’t y’all watch where you land those things?” Ethel shouts. “That oak is a thousand years old.”
“You coming with us in the copter?” the man shouts back at her. “If we should need someone to identify the body—”
“She ain’t dead yet,” Ethel spits back. Silence covers my mouth, but I know that Ethel is still holding my hand. And then we are suddenly rising together above the tree line. Around us, the blue light spreads like script through the clouds.
“What is your name?” one of the men shouts at me over the deafening sound. “What is the year? Can you count backward from ten? Do you know where you live?”
“How is she supposed to answer you if she can’t hear you?” Ethel shouts back. I want to tell her that her desert is nearby. That I’ve seen it. “Phoenix,” I say, looking at her.
“We ain’t going to Phoenix,” she yells at me. “In fact, I’d better pinch myself and make sure it was you not me who keeled over, ’cause I sure never seen my Lyra from such a great height.”
Then it is quiet again, the quiet of dreamless sleep, that soft black country of permanent dusk. “Where?” I ask, but my throat is full of dust.
“We’re stuck in this forlorn hospital on the mainland,” Ethel replies.
I look at her imploringly. My voice is caught somewhere beneath my lungs. The words burn in my mouth, but I cannot say them. Something has been disconnected; they have ripped the entire architecture of English from me.
“I knew never to trust them doctors. Now they’re saying you had a stroke and they won’t let us leave. I tried to explain to ’em I just gave you a fright with all my storytelling about Mr. Death.” I look at Ethel and notice, for the first time, how like my father’s eyes hers are—far apart, as if they were meant to look not ahead but all around, to the world’s ghostly periphery. And cedar-colored. I have known her since we were barely women, and only now can I pinpoint why she has always seemed so familiar. My own body, though, is unfamiliar. Wires are sunk into my veins. I try to draw my hands up, to pull the electrodes from my temples, but my arms are weak as feathers. You ready, Dr. Madera? I’m ready. You ready, Mrs. Ranier?
“You got nothing on your head,” Ethel says. I kick my leg, but she stills me with her hand. “There, there. Simon and Ray and Zelda are on their way. Those gosh-darn blue lights—even talking about them brings Him ’round.”
Gabriel lies on his side, in his room there at the edge of the property, somewhere beyond these walls. The swamp shudders. A black night spirals out above him. Even the stars shine too loud. An alligator crawls through the grass, closer. Almost upon him.
“Stop,” I shout, my voice returning.
“Stop what?” Ethel asks me.
I have to warn him. I close my eyes, but instead of his room, I find myself on a train crossing the sea. The water is translucent below me, filled with cacti, pine trees, a kaleidoscope of gems. I can hear the faintest tide lapping at the rails: cross, cross, cross. Gabriel enters the train car. He speaks to me in another language, a language of falling rain and bells. There is a celebration on the horizon; the bells grow louder, more concentrated, marking the arrival of a new time.
I open my eyes as a picture of my mother walks toward me and sits on the bed by my side.
“Sanya,” I say.
“You should rest,” she says. I want to tell her how I have missed her but then all is dark, the dark of space. It is too heavy to lift myself out from this whirlpool. A man rows me out into the unknown ocean. The current grows rougher against the boat. This room of the universe looks unlike anything else, as if we are journeying into a color the human eye cannot perceive. It is so bright and so dark at once. Though we move horizontally, it feels as if we are falling backward. No desert, no breathing sky, just this cool black wind. But the ferryman shines, his skin all carnival light, and turns us in the water. “We’re going back, milady,” the ferryman says. “You’re not finished.”
Awake in a blinding room. My daughter sits beside me. There is dander in her hair, coffee stains on her teeth. She smells of the woods after a rain. If her face were a jigsaw puzzle, I could reconcile its pieces and she would appear to me as another. As Gabriel.
“I have to tell you,” I say. I barely recognize my own voice. “Your father—”
But at that moment the hospital door opens again, and light bleeds in, along with Simon and his Raymond.