The Immortalists

  “What the fuck, Klara? What’s wrong with you?” Raj takes Ruby in his arms and helps her spit, flushing out her mouth with his hands. He wets a paper towel and gently wipes her eyes and nose. Then he puts both hands against the counter and leans forward, resting his chin in the baby’s dark hair. It takes Klara a moment to realize he’s crying.

  “You were talking to Simon,” he says. “Weren’t you?”

  “The knocks. I’ve been timing them. I wasn’t sure if they were real before, but I know it now: they are, they just spelled—”

  Raj leans in as if to kiss her. But he pauses with his nose at her cheek before withdrawing.

  “Klara.” When he looks at her, there’s something vivid in his face, something alive, something she thinks is love before she realizes it’s fury. “I can smell it on you.”

  “Smell what?” asks Klara, buying time. She downed two mini bottles of Popov in the trailer; they were supposed to help her steady.

  “You must be some kind of masochist, to do this to us now. Or do you just think I’ll always be here to pick up the pieces?”

  “It was one drink.” She hates the way her voice shakes. “You’re controlling.”

  “Is that what you tell yourself?” Raj’s eyes widen. “Years ago. If I hadn’t found you. Where do you think you’d be?”

  “Better off.” She’d be in San Francisco, doing gigs on her own. She’d be lonely, but in control.

  “You’d be a drunk,” says Raj. “A failure.”

  Ruby gazes at Klara from Raj’s arms. Blood rushes to Klara’s cheeks.

  “The only reason you’re still doing what you’re doing,” Raj says, “is because I met you. And the only reason you were getting by before you met me was because you were ripping people off. You stole, Klara. Shamelessly. And you think all you were doing was giving people a good show?”

  “I was giving people a good show. I am,” says Klara. “I’m trying to be a good mother. I want to be a success. But you don’t know what it’s like in my head. You don’t know what I’ve lost.”

  “I don’t know what you’ve lost? Do you know—do you have any idea—what happened in my country?” Raj wipes his eyes with the heel of his free hand. “Your dad had a business, a family. You still have a mom and a sister and a doctor big brother. My dad picked trash; my mom died so young I can’t remember her. Amit died in ’85 on a plane, minutes from Bombay, the first time he tried to go home. Your family had it good. They have it good.”

  “I know how difficult your life has been,” Klara whispers. “I never meant to minimize that. But my brother died. My father died. They didn’t have it good.”

  “Why? ’Cause they didn’t live till ninety? Think about what they had while they were here. People like me, on the other hand—we hang on by our teeth, and if we’re really, really lucky, if we’re fucking exceptional, we get somewhere. But you can always be airlifted out.” Raj shakes his head. “Jesus, Klara. Why do you think I don’t talk to you about my problems, real problems? It’s ’cause you can’t take it. You don’t have space in your head for anyone’s problems but yours.”

  “That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “But is it true?”

  Klara can’t speak; her brain is tangled, wires crossed, the monitor shutting down. Raj checks Ruby’s diaper and reties the laces on her tiny shoes. He takes the diaper bag from Klara’s shoulder and walks to the bathroom door.

  “I swear to God, Klara, I thought you were getting better. Soon as the health insurance comes through, soon as we get a day off, I’m taking you to see somebody. You can’t lose it now,” he says. “We’re too close.”

  • • •

  December 28th, 1990. If the woman is right, Klara has four days to live. If the woman is right, she’ll die on opening night.

  There must be a loophole, a secret trapdoor. She’s a magician, goddammit. All she has to do is find the fucking trapdoor.

  She takes a red ball to bed and plays with it under the covers. She’s figured out how to turn it into a strawberry. A French drop from the right hand to the left makes the ball disappear. Then she moves her left hand over her right. When she does a shuttle pass and opens her left fist again, there’s the cool, fragrant fruit. She eats each strawberry and tucks their green stems under the mattress. Then she slips out of the RV.

  It’s black, black night, but it must be over ninety degrees. She can hear people moving around in their campers: showering and cooking, eating and arguing, yelps from the teenage couple in the Gulf Stream who are constantly having sex. Everywhere, there’s life: rattling in tin cans, trying to get out.

  She walks to the pool. It’s shaped like a kidney bean and glows an acid, unearthly blue. There are no pool chairs—the manager claims they only get stolen—so Klara stands at the deep end. She takes off her tank and shorts, letting them fall in a clump. Her stomach is still soft and creped from Ruby. When she removes her underwear, her pubic hair seems to bloom.

  She jumps.

  The water surrounds her like a membrane. Klara’s feet look nearer than they are, and her arms seem to bend. The pool appears shallower than eight feet, though she knows this is an illusion. Refraction, it’s called: light bends when it enters a new medium. But the human brain is programmed to assume that light travels in straight lines. What she sees is different than what’s there.

  She’s heard the same thing about stars: they appear to twinkle when light, viewed through earth’s atmosphere, becomes bent. The human eye processes the movement as absence. But the light is always there.

  Klara breaks through the water. She gasps.

  Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing. If Simon and Saul are contacting Klara, then consciousness survives the death of the body. If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all.

  She turns onto her back and floats. If the woman is right, if she could see Simon’s death in 1969, then there’s magic in the world: some strange, shimmering knowledge in the very heart of the unknowable. It doesn’t matter whether or when Klara dies; she can communicate with Ruby just as she does with Simon now. She can cross boundaries, like she always wanted to.

  She can be the bridge.

  19.

  The billboard outside the hotel has changed. Tonight, it reads. The Immortalist, with Raj Chapal. The show won’t begin until eleven o’clock—a New Year’s Eve special—but the entrance is already overflowing with tourists. Raj parks the Sunbird in the employee lot. Usually, she carries their bags and he carries Ruby, but tonight Klara won’t let go of the baby. She’s put Ruby in a red party dress that Gertie sent for Ruby’s first birthday, with thick white tights and black patent leather shoes.

  They walk through the lobby. Fish glow and scuttle in the fifty-foot aquarium. The tiger habitat is swarmed, though the animals are sleeping, their downy chins flat on the concrete. Raj and Klara turn toward the elevators. This is where they’ll part: Raj will bring their bags to the theater, and Klara will bring Ruby to day care.

  Raj turns to her and puts his hand on her cheek. His palm is warm, calloused from work in the shop. “You ready?”

  Klara’s heartbeat trips. She looks at his face. It’s beautiful: the swan’s neck of each cheekbone, the angular chin. His shoulder-length hair is in a ponytail, as usual; the makeup artist will blow it out and add silicone to make it shine.

  “I want you to know that I’m proud of you,” he says.

  His eyes are glossy. Klara inhales in surprise.

  “I know I’ve been hard on you. I know things have been tense. But I love you; I love us. And I have faith in you.”

  “But you don’t believe in my tricks. You don’t believe in the magic.”

  She smiles. She f
eels sorry for him, for how much he doesn’t know.

  “No,” he says, frustrated, like he’s talking to Ruby. “There’s no such thing.”

  Families surge toward the elevators, moving around Klara and Raj, through them, and Raj drops his hand. When they’re alone again, Raj puts it back where it was, but it’s harder, now, his palm cupping her jaw.

  “Listen. Just because I don’t believe in your tricks doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you. I think you’re great at what you do. I think you have the power to affect people. You’re an artist, Klara. An entertainer.”

  “I’m not a show pony. I’m not a clown.”

  “No,” says Raj. “You’re a star.”

  He drops his bags and reaches for her. With his arms around her back, he pulls her close and squeezes. Pressed to Klara’s breast, Ruby squeaks. Their family of three. Already they feel like ghosts, like people she used to know. She thinks of the days—they feel so long ago—when she thought Raj could give her everything she wanted.

  “I’m going upstairs,” she says.

  “Okay.” Raj makes a fish face at Ruby, who giggles. “Wave goodbye, Ruby. Wave goodbye to your papa. Wish him good luck.”

  • • •

  The woman who runs the day care cracks the door when Klara knocks. The suite behind her is filled with the children of stagehands and performers, receptionists and line cooks, managers and maids.

  “Nuts tonight.” She looks like a hostage, her face haggard behind the bolted chain. “Happy fucking New Year.”

  Klara hears the crash of glass and a series of whooping noises.

  “Good God,” shouts the woman, turning. Then she faces Klara again. “Mind if we make this quick? Hello, you.”

  She unbolts the door and wiggles a finger at Ruby. Klara clutches the baby. Everything in her that is rational resists letting go.

  “What, you’re not dropping her off tonight? Don’t you have a show?”

  “I am,” says Klara. “I do.”

  She smooths Ruby’s cowlicky black hair, cups her soft fatty cheeks. She only wants the baby to look at her. But Ruby squirms: the other children have distracted her.

  “Goodbye, my love.” Klara puts her nose to Ruby’s forehead and inhales the milky sweetness, the sour sweat—the essential humanness—of her skin. She drinks it in. “I’ll see you soon.”

  • • •

  When she gets in the elevator again, it’s as though Simon’s been waiting for her. She sees him in the glass, his face waving rainbow like an oil spill. She rides to the forty-fifth floor. She only wanted to see the view from the top, but luck’s on her side: when she steps into the hall, a housekeeper comes out of the penthouse suite. As soon as the woman enters the elevator, Klara lunges for the door. She catches it with her pinky and steps inside.

  The suite is bigger than any apartment Klara’s ever seen. The living room and the dining room have cream leather chairs and glass tables; the bedroom sports a California King as well as a TV. The bathroom is as large as the RV, with an extra-long Jacuzzi and two marble sinks. In the kitchen, there’s a steel refrigerator with full-sized bottles of alcohol instead of minis. She takes a bottle of Bombay Sapphire and Johnnie Walker Black Label, a Veuve Clicquot. She rotates between them, coughing on the champagne before she starts the cycle again.

  She’s forgotten to look at the view. The thick, folded curtains, also cream, are closed. When she touches a round button on the wall, they slide open to reveal the Strip, glowing with electricity. Klara tries to imagine what it looked like sixty years ago—before twenty thousand men built the Hoover Dam, before the neon signs and the gambling, when Las Vegas was just a sleepy railroad town.

  She walks to the phone and dials out. Gertie picks up on the fourth ring.

  “Ma.”

  “Klara?”

  “My show is tonight. My opening. I wanted to hear your voice.”

  “Your opening? That’s marvelous.” Gertie’s breathless as a girl. Klara hears laughter in the background, a stray cry. “We’re celebrating here. We’re—”

  “Daniel’s engaged!” Varya’s voice; she must have picked up the other receiver.

  “Engaged?” A moment before it registers. “Engaged to Mira?”

  “Yes, silly,” says Varya. “Who else?”

  Warmth seeps through Klara like ink. A new member of the family. She knows why they’re celebrating, why it means so much.

  “That’s wonderful,” she says. “That’s so, so wonderful.”

  When she hangs up, the suite feels cold and abandoned, like a party everyone has just vacated. But she won’t be alone for long.

  • • •

  Magicians have never been very good at dying.

  David Devant was fifty when tremors forced him off the stage. Howard Thurston collapsed on the floor after a performance. Houdini died of his own confidence: in 1926, he let an audience member punch him in the stomach, and the blow ruptured his appendix. And then there’s Gran. Klara always assumed she died during the Jaws of Life in Times Square because she fell, but now she has her doubts. Gran had recently lost Otto, her husband. Klara knows what it’s like to hang on to the world by her teeth. She knows what it’s like to want to let go.

  She opens her purse and retrieves the rope, which is coiled like a snake. It’s the first one she ever used for the Jaws of Life, back in San Francisco. Klara remembers its rough, strong weave, its sudden snap. She stands on the living room table and ties it around the neck of the massive light fixture above.

  She’s been waiting for something to prove that the woman’s prophecies were right. But this is the trick: Klara must prove it herself. She’s the answer to the riddle, the second half of the circle. Now, they work in tandem—back-to-back, head-to-head.

  Not that she isn’t terrified. The thought of Ruby in day care—toddling across the room on her plump legs, shrieking with glee—wrenches every cell in her body. She halts.

  Perhaps she should wait for a sign. A knock—just one.

  She’s so sure the knock will come that she’s startled when, after two minutes, it hasn’t. She cracks her knuckles and remembers to breathe. Another minute passes, then five more.

  Klara’s arms begin to shake. Sixty more seconds and she’ll give it up. Sixty more seconds and she’ll pack her rope, return to Raj and perform.

  And then it comes.

  Her breath is uneven, her chest shuddering; she cries thick, sloppy tears. The knocks are insistent now, they’re coming fast as hail. Yes, they tell her. Yes, yes, yes.

  “Ma’am?”

  Someone is at the door, but Klara doesn’t pause. She hung a Do Not Disturb sign on the knob. If it’s housekeeping, they’ll see it.

  The living room table looks expensive, all glass and sharp corners, but it’s surprisingly light. She pushes it toward the wall and replaces it with a stool from the kitchen bar.

  “Ma’am? Miss Gold?”

  More knocking. Klara feels a flash of fear. She crosses to the kitchen and takes a swig of whiskey, then of gin. Dizziness comes on so suddenly that she has to bend over and drop her head to keep from vomiting.

  “Miss Gold?” calls the voice, more loudly. “Klara?”

  The rope hangs, waiting. Her old friend. She climbs onto the chair and ties her hair back.

  One more look outside, at the stream of people and the lights. One more moment to hold Ruby and Raj in her mind; she’ll speak to them soon.

  “Klara?” shouts the voice.

  January 1st, 1991, just like the woman promised. Klara takes her hands, and they tumble through the dark, dark sky. They flutter crisply as leaves, so small in the infinite universe; they turn and flicker, turn again. Together, they illuminate the future, even from so far away.

  • • •

  Raj is right. She’s a star.

  PART THREE

&
nbsp; The Inquisition

  1991–2006

  Daniel

  20.

  Daniel saw Mira three times before they ever spoke: first in a study carrel at Regenstein Library, writing in a small red notebook, then at the student-run café in the basement of Cobb, striding out of the door with a coffee in hand. Her gait had an electricity that he felt as she brushed past him. He noticed it again a couple of weeks later, when he saw her running along the perimeter of Stagg Field, but it was not until May of 1987 that she approached him.

  He sat in the dining commons, eating a pulled pork sandwich. (Gertie would have had a heart attack if she’d known he was eating pork. He’d even developed a taste for bacon, which he kept in the refrigerator of his Hyde Park apartment and which he swore she could smell on him whenever he returned to New York.) At three p.m., the space was nearly empty; Daniel ate at this time because his clerkship rotation ran from six a.m. to two thirty. He felt a gust of air as the front doors opened, another chill as he recognized the young woman in the frame. Her eyes whisked through the room, and then she began to walk toward Daniel. He pretended not to notice her until she stopped in front of his four-person table.

  “Do you mind if I—?” She had a sturdy leather tote bag on one shoulder and an armful of books.

  “No,” said Daniel, looking up as if he hadn’t noticed her until now before leaping into action. He cleared a squashed can of Coke and the snakeskin of a straw wrapper, as well as a red plastic basket filled with the detritus of his sandwich: blobs of pork fat and maroon sauce. “Of course not.”

  “Thanks,” said the woman, in a businesslike tone. She sat down diagonally from Daniel, extracted a notebook and pencil case, and began to work.