The man looks around the station, but he can see no one here but us. No sounds except the trickling of water seeping into the station from every corner.
We consider a flood. The mountain quivers and material falls from above him, fine dirt hourglassing down over his face. He places the arm inside his diving bag and thinks.
He looks at the bag again, the way the fingers stretch, openhanded against the fabric. He stares into the dark of the tunnel he hasn’t been through. There’s something there, a large form, but he doesn’t go toward it. A dead train. He can see it ahead of him, a silent dark body, ten cars, maybe less, painted red.
He looks around, suspicious, sounds, storms rushing from somewhere, far away, a howl of a wolf or dog, something, something.
He takes a step in the other direction, to the opposite end of the platform, where there’s only a whistling wind, then returns to the safe, still spot.
He wets his hand in the mere and obliterates the paintings on the walls, the faces of monsters and women, the smiling child, the blur of joy that stands beside him. He blackens his hand removing all of this, erasing it until there is nothing left but gray, but he pauses over a name written low on the tiles.
Dylan, in tilted letters.
He looks up toward the skylight, considering a climb out into day, straight up from this station and into the sun. In the mound of dirt, there are only maggots and blood and rags, someone wounded passing this way once, someone dying, someone dead.
Even if she’s still alive, there’s nothing that could make her return to the surface, and he decides that this is all he needs to know. His enemy can only be dying of infection, if she’s still alive. There’s a pool of dried blood on the floor, likely too much to survive, and the blood tracks to the water, and into it. Her corpse will surface eventually, and the taste of death will plunder the spring water of Herot Hall. It won’t be the first time.
He looks at the mess, thinks better of leaving it, and sweeps the mound of dirt and disaster into our water.
Something cries out from the wet, and he jolts. No.
The sound is coming from behind the counter of the café. A whimper. The man kneels, looking at the floor, tracks in the dust leading away from the place where he found the arm.
He stands, silent, stalking, and then leaps at the counter, and pulls a boy from beneath it.
The boy kicks, bites, screams, and manages to get his teeth into the man’s arm. The man winces, and tugs his arm back, bleeding.
“Let go! They left and I’m waiting for them! They’re coming back for me!” the boy screams.
The man holds the struggling boy out from his own body, and assesses him. This is the consideration of a pillager. Kill the child and the story with him, or swear the boy to secrecy. Or—
“Listen to me. Dana Mills is dead,” the man tells the boy.
The boy stares at him, eyes wild.
“Liar,” he says.
“In the tunnel,” the man tells him, and inclines his head toward the dark. “I found her hiding there. She came after me. It was self-defense. Go look if you don’t believe me.”
The boy stares at him, his lip wobbling.
“Gren?” he asks.
“I killed Gren too,” says the man. “I killed them to save you.”
“I’m not saved,” the boy screams. “I’m not saved! Gren! Help! Help me!”
But no one comes for him, and eventually the man begins to move dirt and rocks away from the tunnel entrance, the side that faces away from the train. He pushes them out from the station, and back toward the world they came from.
BEHOLD
27
Behold the one-armed woman! Why do I find it funny? Why am I laughing? I can’t stop. There’s something bleeding, something searing, something departing, and it’s mine, all of it, but back in the old days your losses could get you set up in a tent being a monster. Watch the armless girl play piano with her toes. Watch the legless boy dance on his hands and I’m laughing but then I’m—
I’m on a marble floor looking down into a lake, and up from the waters of the mere are rising the faces of people I used to know. The world is bent branches, cracking wood. I smell pine needles broken underfoot. The mere twists and turns, and it’s full of my family, clawing up into the roots of the trees and toppling them, and I’m—
I’m swimming through a lake made of blood and salt. My brain blazes fluorescent and my body is a forest fire. It’s a dark red day, a dark red night, a dark red life.
The world is full of voices, and the sound of the water beneath the mountain is inside me, the sound of the last trains running before I was born, sounds I never heard.
The sound of the wind in the winter rushing through the house I grew up in, the voices of the birds taking flight, and my mother’s voice at last, my mother saying, “Listen, Dana, listen—”
“Mama?” I ask, but she doesn’t answer. “Are you there?”
No. She’s diving into the depths where there are things glittering. Gold and stones. Somebody’s grave gifts, somebody’s hoarding, somebody’s weapons and bribes for the land of the dead.
* * *
Gone things aren’t gone forever.
They float up.
They rise. I’m not gone, I’m—
* * *
No, God, I’m facedown in a truck bed, getting ready to be dead. There’s a sack over my face. I think about praying, but I’ve never been any good at asking for help.
I try to sing, but there aren’t songs for this. All I have is a line I read in a library book. I liked it. I memorized it.
All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
I’m on my knees in the sand. They give me words, and I repeat them.
“My name is Dana Mills,” I say. “America, this is your doing.”
My neck bends backward for the blade. I feel the wind of it swinging back, and I’m in a thousand cities at once, and in the blackness there’s a bright star, and it gets bigger, and bigger, and—
Did I see this in a movie I don’t remember watching? Is this a true story or a story my mind made to convince me I was safe? I don’t know what real is, I don’t know what alive is, but—
* * *
I’m on my knees on a mosaic made of stone.
I touch my throat and find a scratch. There’s a sandstorm moving across the desert toward me, a rising cloud of blur, shining and shifting.
I run up a flight of stairs to get out of the way of the storm, and there’s someone in the upper room of the house I’ve tried to hide in. When I come through the door, he doesn’t move, though I feel his attention turn to me. I get ready in case I have to kill him.
Am I dead? I ask.
Maybe, he says.
Is this where everyone goes when they die?
He laughs. No.
Are you some kind of god?
He turns around and I see his face. I don’t know if he’s a man or a monster, or something made of fire. I don’t know about me either. I could be all of that too, a woman, a monster, someone made of flames.
Is this home? I ask him.
He holds out his hands.
Are you something I’ve never seen before?
I don’t know, he says. Are you?
* * *
Now it’s later and I’m wearing a ring on my finger, and the ring is wrapped in thread from my uniform to make it fit. He’s smiling at me, my hands in his hands, my body against his body, and my heart is pounding with joy. There’s a room with a bed, curtained, lanterns, and he is waiting for me in it and I’m home—
* * *
No. I’m sitting in a tent and there’s a sheet stretched, and pictures flicker and fade. Some movie, some desert, some dream. Some story. A burning world. Someone is crying in the distance, but out here, someone always is.
I look to my right, and Lynn Graven is beside me, drinking a Coke. I look to my left, and it’s Raul Honrez, focused on the screen, chewing gum. In front
of me, there’s Renee, but then she flickers too, and then she’s bright with bullet wounds, and then she’s gone.
I hold on to the edge of my folding chair, and out in the dark there’s shouting, and in here, in the dark, I’m alone with my heartbeat, trying to tell myself I’m safe, as the whole world shudders apart like confetti.
I whisper the things I remember.
Home is me and my guys. Home is eating my meal, home is marching, home is the sound of breathing around me, the others asleep on cots. I try to remember my family. I’m standing in a desert alone, looking out over sand. Everyone’s dead but me. Somehow I’m still here.
Am I the last one, trying to bury them, trying to keep their possessions together? Maybe one soldier stands away from the battle to send word if it goes wrong. Maybe it goes so wrong so quickly that she ends up walking down a cliff after the bones are stripped and the fires are out, writing down the names, trying to make a song about great things done in the name of nothing.
There isn’t enough earth for everyone, she writes. Parts of the world are sweet and parts are sour. Parts are drenched and parts are dust—
I have no hand to write. I have no pen. I’m bleeding, listening to falcons shrieking, feeling the sun heating my skin and my blood boiling, and I’m hearing song from everything, even as my body is aching and wounded, even as I should be so long gone I’m not even my own memory. Under the water, the sun is sinking.
* * *
My mother is singing. No, I’m the one singing, a lullaby to a newborn, and I watch him age, I watch him grow, I watch him want what he can’t have.
Gren’s on a roof outside a window, trying to get closer to the boy he let get away. The world has teeth and claws, and my baby thinks he can walk in it. Hotel balconies and back rooms, speeches given in public, children marching, fists up, nothing to shield their hearts from bullets.
They shoot, walk away, let him bleed. No flowers on the curb, no pictures mourning him, no memorial on the fence. My son becomes a place where the sidewalk is stained.
A thousand holes in his flesh, punctured, deflated, gone.
* * *
And I’m back here in the dark, a marble floor, a skylight, my arm a stump on fire, my body screaming out in pain, and the place isn’t safe anymore, it’s not safe, Gren’s not safe, and—
* * *
“Listen,” someone whispers into my ear. I move, looking around, trying to find a way out of here.
“Listen to me. Listen. In some countries, you kill a monster when it’s born. Other places, you kill it only when it kills someone else. Other places, you let it go, out into the forest or the sea, and it lives there forever, calling for others of its kind. Listen to me, it cries. Maybe it’s just alone.”
“What monster?” I ask. “Who’s a monster?”
She’s with me, my truck-stop saint, chest open, candle inside it lit for Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and anyone else.
She’s smoking two cigarettes, flicking sparks, her stringy hair, her sweaty T-shirt, her skin so smooth it glows, like she’s a thing on fire herself, like she can jump water and hit the other side.
The walls are black and the floors are slick, and moss grows on the edges of the river.
We walk out a long tunnel, from the mountain and into the mere, and it’s drained of water. All along the inside of it, there are trees. Spreading branches, crowns of fern fronds, big enough to shade anything, deep green and leaves, flowers on them too, strange spiky things. The trunks of the trees are like scales.
The sky’s orange and pink. The saint takes me walking through the woods, picking her way over thornbushes. I see a skeleton assembled, a sea monster like the one on the rock, but much larger.
The skeleton develops buds, fat swellings along the rib cage, and out of those come flowers, blooming suddenly, a riot of red.
I want my life back, unbroken. I want to start over, but that isn’t a thing people can do. I breathe in, feel the chill of the wind and hear birds singing, all my selves together at once, soldier, daughter, wife, victim, mother, monster.
I want not to know about war and guns and stolen land, not to know about who dies and who lives, not to know who gets enough and who gets nothing.
I want to know that the one I love is going to live on after me, to know he’ll be happy—
* * *
Someone calls my name, Dana Mills! a ringing call to surrender myself, and I sit up, start to stand up, but Gren won’t let me. He snatches me off the ground and he’s running, carrying me.
He’s charging through the dark and into a train that can’t exist, a train hidden inside the mountain, a train I’ve never seen before because it was buried, because he’s delved into the dirt with his friend and brought it out again.
Velvet seats and wooden benches, spiderwebs and berths with old pillows, dishes, luggage racks and my son, leaning over me—
Is this what love is? That you can see each other, even in the dark?
“Mama,” he whispers. “Listen! We’re hiding. Shhh.”
I reach out my hand to touch him, but I don’t have a hand anymore. There it is, falling away from me, an arm I can feel, fingers I can grasp with, drifting down through silt and red darkness. Gone, and something else is gone too.
“Where’s Dylan?”
He shakes his head, his face frozen with loss.
My eyes are open and I’m looking at everything at once, brightness and dark, pain and joy, and in the near distance, someone is roaring a victory, but I’m still here, hidden.
I’m not the one the monster found. I’m not the one who’s captured. I’m not the one who’s dead.
28
Behold. Be held. Be whole. Thole. There are prescriptions willy-nilly, purse dust and childproof bottles. Willa opens them up, holds the pills in her palms, blue, white, red, and yellow. A rainbow of reactions. Five days. Six days. Seven days since Ben Woolf dove into the lake.
She didn’t really know him; now he’s dead. And what was he, really? A one-night stand? She won him as a door prize, but he wasn’t her man. Not her husband. Not her partner. Not her crime.
She watches the golden dragon on her watch, ticking away the seconds remaining in her life. She’s been a perfect daughter and a perfect wife, and now she’s just a clock.
She’ll have to move away from here. Back to the city? But the city, alone, and the stairs and the stairwells and the men and the knives and the—
Willa maintains a vigil. Certain tasks are relegated to women. Mourning, staring into the water, waiting for no one to surface.
It’s a white man who’s missing. Usually, that would be enough to keep it in the news, but eight days in, the police release their grief in an official report. The art of blame-casting is a lesser sorcery. History is written in sand, and a broom changes everything. Every woman knows the art of covering up a mess: a carpet, a dustpan, bleach on the boards. What do you do with the cleaning supplies of the world? Use them to wash the blood away, and grind the bones into bread. Swallow the confessions whispered in bed.
If events don’t make sense, a story grows to cover up the confusion. Motives and mistakes.
Dana Mills, the report says, was a coincidence, a homeless veteran begging at a party, nothing to do with the rest of the disaster, and exonerated anyway, crimeless, a victim of a kidnapping a long time ago, and that is all.
Dylan Herot was grabbed by a bear, female, hungry, and nursing an out-of-season cub. There is a photo on the news, the dead bear’s belly studded with pink nipples.
Roger Herot’s autopsy says he fell on a chef’s knife. He shouldn’t have been running up a mountain in pursuit of a bear, holding not only something sharp, but a rifle he’d never before fired, a weapon belonging to his father. Death by Misadventure, says the report.
Ben Woolf, at last, is blamed for being too good, too loyal to the people he’d signed up to protect.
This, it follows, means everything is the fault of Willa Herot, temptress, and everyone understands tha
t. It’s a thing that happens, even to good men, even to the best of men.
Willa sits in the driver’s seat, edge of the lake, drinking a thermos of coffee, which isn’t coffee. She paints her fingernails red every day, and by nightfall all the scarlet is chipped off.
It’s international news, then national, then local. Tragedies happen every minute of every hour. The world is full of worse than anyone has yet imagined, and there’s only so much room.
Willa Herot told herself a story about a hero, and now she has to clean up her own life.
She imagines Ben Woolf floating underground in a lake of blood, Dana Mills standing over him, Gren sharpening a knife. She imagines him chopped, blistered in a fire pit, eaten. She imagines his body, that flammable hair, the scars he got doing things other than being a hero. Flesh to meat to bone to ash.
The mothers put on parkas, ski pants, and cashmere turtlenecks, and march up the mountain daily to sit with Willa, all the while discussing what it might feel like to die by drowning. They agree it would not be as bad as dying by shark. Something awful happened, but something awful always happens. The mothers sit in Willa’s car, and list for her all the awful things that have happened since the beginning of time.
Willa’s clothes look like armor gone limp in the wash. She’s failed in every direction at once. She can feel a muscle twitching in her jaw, and one beneath her left eye. Her starvation is showing.
The mothers start planning a funeral for Dylan.
“Take this,” they say to Willa, and open the bottles in their purses. There’s every kind of sleep inside them. These prescriptions can make a person sleep for a hundred years if necessary, until everything is different.
They put Willa to bed in her own bed, and she sleeps, dreaming a history she doesn’t remember. She walks the deck of a ship, silk and cotton petticoats, corsets made of whalebone, and under those boards, decks down, there are voices, screams—