Claire remembered standing in the middle of the bright kitchen and feeling, suddenly, as though she needed to lean against something. She rested her back on the side of the refrigerator and said, “You’re making that up.”
Her mother led her to the table, sat her down on one of the yellow swivel chairs and showed her the newspaper account of Lucy Ascher’s death. It was all there, including a recent photograph of the poet accepting an award from the University of Michigan. Someone had looped a large medal on a ribbon around her neck, and the silver caught the flash of the camera. It was the only thing in the picture that shone; Lucy Ascher’s face was solemn and in shadow, and her dark dress hung loosely around her. “I realized then,” Claire said, “that Lucy Ascher actually lived in her death landscape. In that photograph, she looked like she was in mourning for herself or something.”
Claire’s mother had gone to the stove and filled a plate with food. Pancakes were darkening on the griddle, and she lifted them off with a spatula and poured on thick lingonberry syrup. Claire could not eat; she told her mother the food smelled rancid. This, Claire believed, was the real beginning of things. Since that morning, everything had seemed different. Her senses reacted to sights and noises and touches and odors in a new way. It wasn’t just breakfast—nothing smelled good anymore. When she woke in the morning, her teeth hurt, as though she had been grinding them together during the night. She was cold all the time and wore sweatshirts in August.
“This has got to stop,” her mother said one day, entering Claire’s room without knocking. “You’ve been feeling sorry for yourself for too long. Snap out of it. It’s not as if somebody you knew died. I mean it, Claire.”
Her mother took her shopping, dragged her through three malls in one day, made her try on clothes she did not want. “Here,” her mother said, holding up a size-nine blouse in the Junior Jet-Set department of one store. “You can’t go off to that fancy college with no clothes.”
In the dressing room Claire looked at herself in the three-way mirror. From all angles she appeared dull, in shadow, like Lucy Ascher.
“How are you doing in there, hon?” the saleswoman called, poking her head over the top of the saloon-style doors. Claire did not answer. She moved closer to the center mirror, and her breath clouded a small piece of her reflection. Now she looked as though she were only partly there. Was this what Lucy Ascher felt, this tedious drifting away from things? Maybe she was fading a chunk at a time, so that every day something new would be lost—the ability to sneeze, or yawn, or even blink. Horses, she knew, were not able to vomit and often died after gorging themselves on grass. Or maybe everything in her would start to hurt, even the dead cells, her fingernails and hair.
When she was very young she had once sat perfectly still for an hour, to see if she could feel herself growing. Years later she told this to a boy in her geometry class, and he laughed and said in a mock-lewd voice, “Hey, baby, want to feel me growing?”
Claire stood unmoving in front of the mirror, waiting for some kind of perceptible change, even a shimmer. And she felt it, right there in the dressing room, with its rayon smell and its pin-studded carpet and the young girl across the way covering her breasts with crossed arms. Claire thought, This is what it means to be a half-life, and then she slipped further into shadow.
—
They left the library just before closing, walking in silence across the lawn. The grass was no longer springy. The earth was becoming hard-packed, and leaves clotted the gutters. They decided they would sleep apart that night; it had been Claire’s idea, but Julian quickly agreed. He wanted to be able to think for a while. Back in his room, he realized he had missed it. The bed had not been slept in for many nights, and there was a fine settling of dust on the surfaces of furniture. Claire always refused to sleep there. “It looks like Chip and Ernie’s room on My Three Sons,” she said. But Julian liked his room’s stripped, plain look, and he stretched out on the bed.
Claire had opened up to him the way he had wanted her to, but nothing much had changed because of it. She was a bit less of an enigma now, but Julian felt even more overwhelmed than before. Claire was certainly a full-fledged death girl. She could have been elected president of the national organization of death girls, if there were such a thing. She had told him everything—at least the surface of everything—he wanted to know. He understood that there had to be something more underneath, but he did not want to press yet.
Their relationship had evolved so rapidly that it startled him. He was afraid of losing Claire before he got a real grasp on her. At first he had been in awe of Claire, stunned by her, but now he felt something more. He felt sorry for her. He wished he had known her when she was sixteen years old. He could have helped her, he thought. He would have turned her away from the night side of things. Like a good parent, he would have switched on every lamp in her room, pointing things out: See, this is not an image of death. It is only a chair with your cardigan draped over the back. See, this is not a death landscape. It is only your bedroom. Then he would have shut off the lamps and leaned over her bed. Sleep now, he would have said, his hand on her forehead, before tiptoeing out of her room.
chapter two
She always had to be near the window. As a child she would fake impending motion sickness to claim the window seat in the car, and on airplanes she would spend the entire flight with her face pressed up against the tiny, sealed-off square of light. It was not from curiosity; it was just that she needed to have a sense of the distancing of things. She had been sitting at the window the first day Julian walked past. Several yards beyond her dormitory he stopped and looked upward. He was, she later found out, actually trying to guess which window was hers. When he saw her, he quickly turned away. He had not been expecting to see her there, he explained weeks after; he had hoped only for some emblem of her—a cracked prism, maybe, or a sprawling, browning plant.
He looked back again, slowly, hopefully. After a moment Claire leaned over and pushed the window up with both arms. “Hello,” she said from above.
Julian shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his windbreaker. “Oh, hi,” he said. “You probably have a lot of work, right? I should let you get back to whatever you were doing.”
Claire had been reading Hegel by the window all morning, and the room seemed hot now, closed off. She looked down and he appeared eager, even appealing. He rocked back and forth on his heels, waiting. He had been looking at her oddly the past few days, scrutinizing her. First at the water fountain, then at the snack bar, and once at the bookstore. It flattered her and made her feel self-conscious. She was used to distant attention only—discreet yet obvious glances. There was always someone looking at the death girls from across a room whenever they went anywhere. This was different. Bright-eyed Julian, the graceful Frisbee player, was drawn to her. She wondered why.
He reminded her of her brother. She did not think of Seth very often anymore, but whenever she did, or whenever he came to her unsummoned in a dream, his face was blurred, the features melded together. It was that way with all people in her life who had died; she could not visualize any of them—not her brother, her favorite grandmother or her Aunt Sybil, who had been killed by lightning in Montana just six months earlier. So she could not tell if Julian actually looked like Seth, but, like Seth, he gave off an aura of fragility. She did not know if she trusted this quality in him. He almost seemed proud of it, the way he did nothing to hide his vulnerability from her—looking away and blushing slightly whenever they made eye contact, stammering as he stood under her window. Since Seth died five years earlier, Claire’s family had become oriented toward strength. Her mother spooned heaping doses of lecithin and brewer’s yeast into glasses of orange juice every morning and talked on and on about endurance and will.
Claire looked down at Julian, and he seemed small to her. His upturned face was hopeful, almost pleading. “Do you want to come up?” she asked.
/> He bounded up the stairs, and she could hear his clogs clattering all the way up to her floor. Julian was the first male she had known who wore clogs, and she thought they looked good. He tapped his fingers lightly on the door. She opened it, and he seemed about to bow as he came into the room. The two of them sat in silence for a while—she smoking, he picking at some loose threads in a small tear in his jeans, as if it were a scab. She was thinking about how close to each other they were sitting. Usually she backed away, almost automatically, when anyone came too close to her. She didn’t mind Julian sitting there, though. He wasn’t demanding anything of her; he seemed to want just to sit in her room.
“Are you taking Intro. Philosophy?” he asked her. “I saw you carrying the book.”
“Yes,” she said.
“Do you have Parnesi? I had him last year and he’s great.”
“No,” Claire answered. “I have Stein.”
“Oh,” he said. “Did you get past the Republic yet? It seemed like we spent an eternity on it. God, the parable of the cave—I still have dreams about it. And all that ‘Oh tell me, Glaucon,’ stuff. It really starts to swamp you—you know what I mean? Wait until you reach the middle of the course and start reading about the nature of good and evil. I’ll let you look at my old papers if you want, not that they’re masterpieces.”
She realized how hard Julian was trying to have a real rapport with her. She knew that if she was at all cold to him he would be shaken. He was handsome—slim and fair. He had that rural look, she thought: he seemed to be the type of person who would be content sitting on the front porch of a farmhouse all day, plucking a guitar and taking swigs of wine. Men who looked like that were always frightened of her, completely put off. They thought she was too abrasive, and so they stayed away. Julian, on the contrary, appeared to be fascinated, and this in turn fascinated her.
He left after an hour of halting, broken conversation. He asked, leaning against the doorframe as if, she thought, to make it look like an afterthought, whether he could come back and study with her the following day. She nodded and could tell he was elated. Claire returned to the window as he clattered back down the stairs. She let herself fantasize for a moment about putting her arms around someone like Julian. She had not had a lover in almost two years, and the prospect of touch suddenly interested her. She watched him as he walked away from her dormitory. Even from the back he looked like Seth.
For a week after Seth’s funeral, Claire had sat up nights with her parents and her older sister, the four of them hunching over the round kitchen table, as frazzled and grubby as Van Gogh’s Potato Eaters.
“In death there is a sharing,” Rabbi Krinsky said at the funeral. Claire wondered if her parents believed him. He was a sullen, brooding man who had been with the congregation only a few months.
“All I want to do,” Seth said the day he came home from the hospital, “is get real high. Like I used to in high school, when Jimmy Katz and I went out behind the basketball courts during Phys. Ed., and did up two bowls of Acapulco Gold. Get me nice and high, Claire.”
She remembered the day very well and her own fingers putting together a joint, clumsily and wetly. She was fourteen then and had done this only three times in her life. She scratched a match to the joint, and brother and sister smoked quietly until there was nothing left. Seth inhaled one last time; he seemed to be smoking his fingertips. Later, high, he said to her, “I just thought I saw things in black and white for a second. I guess that’s the way dogs see. I wonder what they dream about—maybe visions of Milk Bones dancing over their heads.” He giggled to himself.
It rained all that afternoon, and Claire could hear the tin buckets her father had placed in the leaky basement clank with water. It was warm and damp inside, like a sick child’s vaporized room. The smoke and the rain and the August heat were soporifics; Seth lay down on the tweed couch, his eyes blinking slowly, like a lizard’s. He was falling asleep. Good, Claire thought, good. She felt relieved when her brother was asleep. When he was awake there was that constant knowing look, the expression common to all martyrs—Iphigenia, walking barefoot up the incline, fire sprouting up around her ankles like chickweed, that same expression on her face: I know, I know. Claire could not bear that look. When Seth slept he was just like anyone else.
Claire had read in some magazine that you could never have a dream in which you actually die, because the impact of it would be too much of a shock to the system and would cause you, in real life, to have a coronary or a stroke or something equally fatal. The mind and the body, working together in glorious synchrony, drag you up from rock bottom of sleep, so that you twitch and blink into consciousness before your falling dream body has the opportunity to make contact with the pavement below, or before your drowning dream body has the opportunity to swell its lungs with dark salt water and sink slowly and finally into the deepest regions of the ocean. Not even Seth could die in a dream. The sleep psyche is as innocent as a child, as protective as a mother.
In the beginning, they filled vials with his blood. There was an entirely new vocabulary to be learned; its words were odd and vaguely familiar, in a tongue that seemed as artificial as Esperanto: Basophil. Leukocyte. White count. Platelet. Claire’s mother recited them on the telephone, and the words jumbled together made Claire giddy as she listened. Platelet: a tiny piece of dinnerware used at Lilliputian banquets, easily mistaken for a chink of green bottle glass on a beach.
Seth’s remission, that most desperate of furloughs, had ended. Her parents phoned her at Buck’s Rock Camp, where she was spending the summer on scholarship, taking classes in batik-making. “I think you should come home early, if you possibly can,” her mother said, and the long-distance connection crackled and spat as though to convey the urgency her words could not express.
—
Seth had slept heavily all that afternoon, and when he woke up there was a patina of sweat on his face and neck. “I’m so tired,” he said, “and so stoned.” He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled, patting the couch. “Come sit here.” Claire sat down lightly. It was routine; every day she had visited him in the hospital she had sat on the edge of his high, wide bed, barely resting her weight on it, not wanting to change the balance of anything.
Seth looked up at her, his face flushed, his pupils as full as gourds. “I want to ask you something,” he said.
“Go ahead.”
“Are you afraid of me? I mean, I read in a book by that woman Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, that people are scared off by people with diseases because it reminds them of their own mortality and stuff.”
He was wearing an old T-shirt and a pair of khaki shorts, and he looked as if he were made of balsa wood. His elbow knobs and knees jutted out in hard points, like the edges of furniture you catch yourself on over and over. Claire thought it was the saddest question ever asked. How could she possibly be frightened of him? You can be frightened of death, but not of doom. It was easy to tell the difference: death does not have arms and legs as hairless and pale as a chihuahua, or fingernails bitten down to tiny smiles.
“No,” Claire said. “I’m not afraid of you.”
She leaned into him then, in a way she had not done in a long time. Born two years earlier than she, Seth had never been a forceful older brother. Neighborhood brothers—lifeguards, varsity soccer stars—had bent down and lifted their younger sisters up into the air in one fell swoop, and Claire had always been envious. During games of Running Bases in the backyard, she would charge into Seth as hard as she could, only to feel him sway and give like a tarpaulin in a storm.
Now he hugged her tightly, pulling her down next to him. “Oh,” he said, the word coming from somewhere deep in his throat. “Oh.” First Claire thought there was only despair in his voice, the lowing of a cow being carted off to the marketplace, but then she realized, as he hugged her even tighter, that there was also need. Seth’s arm curved around her and drew
her smack up to him. They were both high; this was craziness. “Claire,” he whispered, “I can’t take it.”
She understood, in that one terrible moment, that he was somehow depending on her. She shivered, thinking that if she were to squeeze him as hard as he was squeezing her, he would snap cleanly, split apart down some invisible seam.
Seth was going to die; this was something she couldn’t change. She felt the magnitude of it then, and it made her ache. She had grown up thinking that it was good to be close to people. There were times when the two of them had had pillow fights, had played board games, had had their photographs taken in one of those little booths together, contorting their faces in different ways for every frame. She had always been told that this kind of closeness was good, and her parents were delighted that she and Seth were real friends. Most siblings seemed to hate each other. The older kid was often a dictator, the younger one a whiner. It had never been that way with Claire and Seth.
But now she wished desperately that they had never been close in the first place. Maybe that way she wouldn’t be feeling so awful now, so sad. For the first time in her life she wanted to keep a certain distance from him. There was already a space there, the kind of wall that separates the sick from the healthy. She and Seth were pressed together but it was not enough, and never could be. There was dead air between them; she could feel it.
Seth brought his face up to hers and kissed her mouth, fully. His breath was as sweet as a baby’s—too sweet, as though he had been eating sugar beets. She kissed him back then because it appeared to be her responsibility, her calling.