Page 36 of A Better World

“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 enoughthat 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 awonk 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’sso 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

---