Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy (18 page)

“Please,” she hissed. “Please open the door.”

“Sarah,” said Greer.

Sarah, standing naked before him, straightened, looked down at her dress. “Please,” she repeated.

“What’s wrong with death, Sarah?”

“What’s wrong with—”

“Yes, death. Stopping. We all must.” At this his eyes clouded over. “Why are you special?”

She backed up. “Please,” she asked again. “I don’t want to miss him grow up. Please. Please send me.”

11

Robert didn’t have to be locked in the car long to notice the heat. Sweat beaded on his brow, ran down his cheeks, gathered in his hair. (As soon as Robert saw himself in the car, he began to tremble. Montague watched him carefully as this edged toward convulsion. The memory and image began to merge, the long-suffered dream no dream at all, but only a hazy, long-ago reality.)

How long had she been gone? He felt dull. Thoughts moved over him like slow wakes.

Robert climbed over the gearshift and sat on his knees in his mother’s seat. His heart sped up as he reached for the steering wheel. She’d never told him not to, exactly, but he understood the tacit prohibition. He glanced around cautiously, but seeing only the sun he turned away, remembering his mother’s admonition against staring into it.

Robert looked out the window at what she’d called a church. It looked like no church he’d ever seen.

(Here, his shaking slowed down, as did what he was witnessing. He knew what was coming, though he couldn’t think of it. The trance had captured his mind, rendered him only a viewer, incapable of thought. The church was there, crisper than in his dreams, a stark white clay reflecting the sun, and then his mother walked out of the church, slowly; it was as if he were watching film, and this film was missing several clips, as what he saw moved disjointedly, like bad stop-motion animation.)

And then the light appeared behind her. Wrapped it tendrils around her. Engulfed her.

Robert watched himself, the boy, staring at his vanishing mother with mouth agape, eyes wide.

* * * * *

Robert’s eyes clicked open. He was pale. “Shit,” he mumbled.

Monty, stroking his chin thoughtfully, said, “You were under less than a minute when you went into convulsions.”

Robert stared at him. Sweat streaked his cheeks.

“The memory hit before I regressed you, and you screamed your mother’s name. It took me fifteen minutes to get hold of you.”

“I—I remember . . . all of it. But I wasn’t even five.”

“The mind is a warehouse. Every memory is stored, but as a person ages it becomes more and more difficult to access all the files.”

“Did I —”

“Yes, you described the memory as you reclaimed it. It was much as I remember it.”

“My father told me she burst into some kind of church, and that—”

Monty nodded. “He didn’t think you’d come looking for me, or he imagined I had died long ago. He couldn’t accept your mother disappearing in this town. Not here.”

“You should have heard him.” Robert looked up. The last frame of the memory suddenly hit him. “Where is she?” His mind raced, but the other man only smiled. “She’s not dead, is she?”

“She should be.”

“Where is she?”

“Your mother should have died years ago, but instead has upset the balance of things. So now it’s you who are sick. I made a mistake when I sent her.”

“Sent her where?”

“I am tired of this,” said Monty. “You’ll understand the door if I open it.”

In one smooth motion he stood, tossed off his garment. He was nude. Fat and muscle moved, like worms, beneath his loose skin. He raised his arms with a grunt, opened his hands. They nearly touched the crossbeams.

Suddenly, Robert was very afraid. Fear had been near for so long he was surprised he noticed, but this was more. This was terror.

Monty lifted his legs one at a time, stomped them on the floorboards like a sumo wrestler. It was like thunder. He closed his hands, smashed them onto his thighs, timing the blows to his stomps. After a time of this he paused, reared back, his mouth wide. A deep, hollow sound came from him. Then he brought his entire body down, and both his fists smashed into the floorboards.

Robert stood, reached out, screamed for him to stop, but his voice was swallowed by the echoing sound of the blows.

Then he saw it.

It was in the middle of the room and obscured half of Monty’s body. Robert reached out and the room wavered, shimmered like the surface of a disturbed pond. As he neared the hole in the center of the room, he cocked his head like a fascinated dog, but didn’t notice that it had grown quiet. Everything was utterly silent.

Deep within the black was a color. It wasn’t quite purple, and wasn’t red, but was as indefinite as fog, and he tried to make it out, but the color dispersed, floating against the black like a cloud.

Suddenly, a sensation Robert had never before felt gripped him: All his life since that day outside Earth Cathedral had been leading up to this. Every moment had been nothing but a preparation for this. He supposed most men had this feeling only once, perhaps twice, in their life: President’s and dictator’s, philosophers and scientists.

He stepped forward.

His foot slipped, and he looked down, saw a beach and screamed, his eyes wide and disbelieving. Stepping back, he dropped to his knees, clutched long stalks of grass. Yellow grass. A heavy, ominous thunder walked across the sky. He flinched, looked up, and the heavens were vast and starless and engorged. Cloud formations drifted, very close. They were gray and black, though off in the distance a slash of purple cumulous rippled with lightning. He glanced over his shoulder. A crimson haze hung motionless. “Where—” but he knew.

I’ve dreamt this, he remembered, and thought back to when his mother had vanished, how her eyes had been glazed over, as if she had been seeing past the world, and how she’d disappeared before him.
Perhaps she hadn’t disappeared at all,
he thought.
Perhaps she came here.

Slowly, he took to his feet, turned around. He was on the edge of a cliff. Too many steps in one direction and he would fall hundreds of feet, land on a beach. Behind him, foliage met the sky. He stepped to the edge. Rocks surrounded the base of the mountain; some lay near the water.

Water that did not move.

He stared, studying it, kept thinking his eyes were tricking him. His eyes roamed the ocean to the horizon line, but none of it moved with the rhythms of tides. It pooled at the shore. Feet inland, the sand showed none of the signs of erosion. It was dry, the color of bone.

Just then he heard something and jumped back. In the sky above the ocean a tail slipped into a cloud. He made out the ripple of wings. Then something screeched and he spun, his arms defensively before his face, but saw nothing.

He remained in a defensive posture for a time, then he slowly straightened, took a couple of steps, searching the brush for signs of movement. As he neared the edge of the forest, he considered reaching up, touching the curving arm of a branch, then thought,
What if none of this exists? What if you never came up from the hypnosis?

This made sense. It more than made sense, in fact, but if it were true wouldn’t this very thought awaken him?

He felt like screaming, like tearing through the forest, but he couldn’t bring himself to believe the thought that made sense. When the memory of his mother had hit him, it had been real, but he hadn’t been behind the little boy’s eyes. He’d been a voyeur, a fly on the psychic wall.

What if you’re dead?

And that clinched it.
Doesn’t matter.
If I am, I am. But I can smell this place, I can see this place, I can feel it beneath my feet, and these are the criteria human’s use to define what is real.

“Boy, some door,” he said, taking a deep breath and looking around, wondering if all he saw his mother had seen as well. If Monty had indeed opened the same door, and she had crossed over, was she still here? Could he find her?

Robert entered the forest.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Death of the Past, Birth of the Future

1

It was nearly midnight and Robert hadn’t returned.

Mary was pacing the living room, biting her fingernails, eying the phone. Finally, she lifted it, dialed her number and waited for one of her parents to pick up. Instead, Grady did. “Where’s Mom and Dad?” she asked.

“They went out,” said Grady. “Why? What’s up?”

“The guy hasn’t come back yet.”

“Has he called?”

“I wouldn’t be calling you if he had.”

Grady hesitated. For a moment, all Mary heard was the hum of her breathing, which sounded somehow like thinking. “What are you going to do?” asked her friend, when finally she spoke.

“And here I was calling you for ideas.”

“What if he’s been in an accident?”

Mary turned that one over, along with the possibility that his sickness, whatever it was, had bested him. Should she call local hospitals? With that, Mary was off to the races: anything was possible. “Maybe I’ll stay here tonight. No sense waking Jenn.”

“Jenn? That the girl?”

“She’s upstairs sleeping.” Mary absently stared through the banister, suddenly getting the feeling the little girl was sitting at the top of the stairs. But Jenn wasn’t there. “Yeah,” she continued. “Just tell Mom and Dad I’m sleeping here, and that I’ll give them a call in the morning. Unless he gets back before then.”

Mary said goodbye, hung up, then sat on the couch in the den and flipped on the television. Conan O’Brien was on. His red hair flopped as he told a joke about Enron. But nothing seemed funny tonight. In time, her eyes shut. O’Brien’s whine drifted in and out of her mind.

She dreamed.

* * * * *

Startled by seeing familiar features on a face on her dream-beach, Mary awoke with a start. She was standing before she realized it was morning, and that she was no longer dreaming. Her right hand was shaking. It took a moment before she remembered where she was and what was going on. The clock above the television told her it was minutes before ten in the morning. Maybe Robert had returned and decided not to disturb her. Maybe.

She rounded the couch, then raced to the stairs, took them two at a time; but before reaching the top, she spotted Jenn sitting below in the living room. Mary cocked her head, stopping in mid-stride.

“Hey, sweetheart,” she said, doing her best to sound reassuring even though she was well beyond frightened herself.

Jenn’s legs were together and bobbing, her clasped hands rested over her thighs, and her head was slightly bowed.

Much slower than she’d climbed, Mary descended the stairs carefully, as if Jenn might feel heavier steps. Then she drew close to her, bent to one knee, taking Jenn’s hands in hers. The little girl looked up, her eyes dark and full.

“Did you mean it?” asked Jenn.

“Mean what?”

“When you said that you wanted to have a girl like me?”

Mary looked away: The girl had lost her mother, and now her daddy hadn’t come home. Jenn felt utterly unwanted. “Oh, honey,” said Mary, bursting into tears, thinking that she wasn’t wanted herself: her mother was angry with and ashamed of her, and Scott had discarded her like old drumsticks. And what would he decide once she told him? Mary hugged Jenn, who began crying, too, and that’s when she had the thought of bringing the little girl home with her. She would call the police, fill out whatever report she had to, but the girl wasn’t going to be placed in some home, just another overgrown fetus with a hungry mouth. No way.

She picked up Jenn, who held on a little harder than she had to. “Come on, sweetheart. Why don’t you come home with me?”

“Okay,” said Jenn. Then she pulled back. “Do you think he’s all right?”

“He’ll be fine, honey.”

Jenn searched Mary’s face, her eyes wider than ever.

* * * * *

“What in God’s name were you thinking?” Freddie screamed, one hand on her forehead, the other planted on her hip.

Mary looked up at the darkening sky, thinking, Well, girl, what exactly were you thinking? “We went to the police and filed a report, Mom. Where else was she going to stay?”

“Well, I don’t know. Certainly not here.” Freddie was slowly moving away, toward the street, her sandals sliding along the driveway. Pebbles skittered away from her feet.

George, who’d been silent until now, laid a hand on Mary’s shoulder. “You did the right thing, honey. I’m proud of you.”

Freddie whirled around. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, are we an orphanage? Come on, George, your daughter comes home with that little prick’s fetus inside her and all of a sudden you’re Mister Philisophical!” She turned away, throwing her hands up. “Maybe we’re not an orphanage after all. We’re a fucking asylum!”

As if to protect her, George stepped in front of his daughter. “Give us a moment, Mary. I’m so sorry.”

Mary nodded, slowly turning away from her father’s voice, which became a whispery growl she’d never heard before. The tears came before she opened the front door.

* * * * *

Freddie hadn’t spoken to her in more than a week, and to say that the mood had been heavy around the house would be a little like saying constipation was strangely liberating. It seemed to Mary that her mother wasn’t just disappointed, wasn’t merely embarrassed or ashamed. No, it kind of seemed like Freddie hated her.

The words wouldn’t go away: We’re not an orphanage after all. We’re a fucking asylum.

Ever since Scott had cast her aside, she’d believed the worst treatment a person could suffer was that sort of apathetic dismissal. It was that blank look that had hurt the most, a look that seemed to say, Do I actually have to say this and deal with your reaction? Couldn’t I just send you a card?

But her mother’s invective had left this in doubt.

Today was no different. Mary had made it up around six, just in time to drag Jenn out of the bed in the guest room (which she’d begun thinking of as Cell Block Jenn), get her dressed and to school in time for the warning bell. When she’d returned home Mom and Dad had been sharing breakfast in the kitchen, but the moment she’d strolled in Freddie had shot up and brushed past her. Dad had glanced down at his bowl of oatmeal, casually shrugging and apologizing that things had come to this. The whole thing was wearing him out.

And that’s when it hit Mary that she should reach outside of her family and single friend, that she should tell Scott about the baby. He should know, right? Sooner or later, whoever came for abandoned children would come calling, and it would be just her and Grady again, alone in Cell Block Mary. Maybe Scott had missed her, maybe he had had second thoughts. Perhaps the field wasn’t as large as he’d thought. And wouldn’t he care, wouldn’t anyone care, about a new life?

Mary excused herself. She changed, then sat beside Grady on the bed. The spiky spitfire’s customary rising time wasn’t even around the corner, the corner being noon. Mary kissed her on the forehead, whispered that she loved her, then took off for the wrong side of the tracks.

* * * * *

Locals called this section of Simola Straight Third Area, and driving through it had always given Mary a case of the nerves. She’d borrowed Dad’s ancient Lincoln, but even this heap looked like a Rolls in this part of town. She struggled to keep her speed at the prescribed twenty-five miles an hour. It seemed neither air conditioning nor gainful employment existed in this part of the world: people were milling about outside, some of them leaned back against the odd cinder block wall, cigarettes dangling from their lips, others orbiting in loose groups and talking not only with their hands but with their entire bodies. But they all put the daily grind on hold when they spotted the white bitch sliding by in the wheels that looked as good as they had the day the factory sticker had been taped over its window.
Those aren’t eyes,
she thought.
They might as well be bullets.

When she pulled into Scott’s driveway, drums boomed from behind the garage door. This terrified her. Somehow, she hadn’t expected to show up and see him right away, but now that it seemed likely, adrenaline surged through her. She gripped the steering wheel as if it were the edge of a cliff, drawing a deep breath. No big deal. After all, this wasn’t about her. This was about the Peter Pan banging away on a taped-over set of drums.

Mary opened the door, got out and listened to Scott play. He’d improved. He’d always been good, perhaps better than good, but God, he was sounding more and more like those Rock and Roll gods he’d invoked since she’d first seen him stroll into Freshman Comp four years ago.

Approaching the door, she continued to breathe deeply. She pulled open the screen and lightly rapped on the door, not noticing that she was tapping her foot to the beat. She waited, listening for sounds, but heard nothing. She knocked again. This time someone yelled that he was fucking coming, hold your fucking horses.

The door opened and a cloud of pot smoke wafted out. An oversized boy stood before her; he must have been six-four or five, and his long, oily hair stretched to the middle of his stomach, and his eyes were glass, his smile missing two teeth at misfortunate spots. He took an eyeful before cracking his broken smile wider that a photographer for Heavy Metal might have suggested. He nodded. “T’sup.”

“Scott around?”

The boy stepped aside, ushered her in, mumbling, “In the garage.” He pronounced it
gay-rawge
.

Mary eyed him as she slide past, thinking of Mike Randall. She wasn’t sure this boy would even go to the trouble of pouring moonshine down her throat.

Before she knew it she was at the door, her fingers at the knob, and then the thing was swinging open.

Scott stopped, his arms above his head. A vaguely stunned look spread over his face. He dropped his sticks on the cement floor. He was high as a mushroom cloud. “Mary,” he said, as if he needed to remind himself of her name.

She nodded, looking over him dispassionately. This was the guy she’d been pining for? “Hey,” she said, but a thought passed through her mind, quickly. What if he said, Yeah baby, I’d love to help raise a rugrat. Oh, the things I could teach her.

The adrenaline had passed and Mary was left sizing up a boy who might never make the trip to manhood, a boy who might play in a successful band, but who more likely would work at a gas station until his liver gave out, burying his half-life beneath a deluge of alcohol and an ever increasing arsenal of drugs. She suddenly understood that she had done some growing up over the last couple of months, and Scott had done some drinking and smoking and probably some fucking. Mary smiled. It wasn’t cruel, the smile, but soft and so radiant that the drummer’s mouth dropped open and he whispered, “Wow.”

“Never mind,” said Mary, turning and moving toward the door without even a backward glance. She passed the overgrown pot-head slumped on the couch, a glass bong between his legs. “Hey, where ya goin’?” he asked. “Don’t you wanna suck my bong?”

Mary got the hell out.

* * * * *

Mary was at home alone when the first of the cramps hit her. She cried out, doubled over, and grabbed hold of her bed sheets. The cramps were sudden and violent, and they caused her to squint, to grimace. Slowly, using the sheets as leverage, she shoved herself from the bed, onto the floor, and crawled to the bathroom.

* * * * *

Propped against the bathtub, Mary stared at the toilet, her eyes unfocused. It was in there, floating and miniscule and dead, a small mass of blood and tissue, created and now uncreated.

It was over.

Her mother had no reason to hate her anymore, her father had no reason to be afraid, and Grady could stop talking about buying diapers and cheese and formula. As suddenly as she’d found out, it was over. And so Mary just sat there, dumbly staring at the toilet, wondering what it was she was feeling. She’d been terrified of being a mother, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t wanted it. She hadn’t really thought about it much, but it was dawning on her that she wanted it more than anything. America’s New Woman would frown on her, but she hadn’t really wanted to go off to college, to start a career, to be ambitious and daring. There was no romance in it, no life, just go, go, go, deposit the check and report back in the morning. But to fall in love, to have that ring pushed onto your finger while he knelt there before you, to stand in the narthex of a church dressed all in white, every eye in your world on you for the briefest and most eternal of moments, to live in the world of Happily Ever After.

But it was over.

The father was a stoner who picked up a set of sticks and banged around once in a while, and maybe he’d someday be immortalized on a compact disc and maybe he wouldn’t, but either way he wasn’t even close to a man, and she doubted he ever would be. And just over the rim of a fucking toilet was the tissue that bore their genetic imprint; but just like their union, it was dead and small and unfinished. And she was just sitting here, empty. And the emptiness was worse than death.

Mary wanted to get up, wanted to flush the toilet, rush to her bedroom and cry, wanted to do a lot of things, but she only sat there, the minutes clicking away like hours, the hours like years, until Grady knocked on the bathroom door.

And a new future was born.