Find Me (22 page)

A young woman is on the porch in a nubby sweater and corduroy pants and rubber boots. I appreciate the soft look of her clothing. On the road softness is something I miss.

There is something strange about her body, something misshapen, and it's not until we reach the edge of the front yard that I see the white angel wings hanging from her back.

She waves to us, this woman.

We cross the yard, through the mud and slush. We watch the woman pet her wings. We tell the woman our names. We say we're looking for a place to sleep. We ask if she can help us.

The woman's name is Darcie. She has freckles on her eyelids. The tips of her front teeth are stained caramel. She lives here with a man, Nelson, and they call this place the Mansion. She tells us we can stay for as long as we like.

“The Mansion always has room,” she says, opening the door.

Inside she gives us water in Mason jars. There's grit floating in the bottom, but we couldn't care less. We hold our jars with both hands and gulp the water. I close my eyes and feel the cool slip down my throat. I chew the grit when it gets stuck in my teeth. Exhaustion has brought on strange pains in my face: aches in the jaw, along my hairline, in the spaces between my eyes.

There is no sign of this other person, this Nelson. The Mansion is warm and quiet.

“Where did you come from?” Darcie wants to know.

We're standing in a dim kitchen, and I can make out a big metal sink and long windows. White candles, burned to waxy nubs, on the sills. An old boxy refrigerator. The door is ajar and I catch the scent of rot.

A blue tile floor streaked with mud, like a sky with a storm rolling in.

“From the west,” we reply.

Darcie rests a fist under her chin, like she's giving careful thought to our origins, to what it means to have come from the west. Two downy feathers fall from her wings and into the shadows below.

When we ask where she came from, she tells us that she cannot remember.

*   *   *

Darcie gives us a room on the second floor. This room is empty except for a bare mattress with a white sheet. The floorboards are swollen. The walls are peeling. A window overlooks the backyard, a small sprawl of land surrounded by a halo of leafless trees and then dark woods, the rounded treetops stretching into the beyond. On one wall, we find a series of stick figures drawn in pencil. The figures are taking shits and fucking and choking each other.
LIFE WHO NEEDS IT
someone has written below them in big jagged letters.

Once we're alone, the sky turning dark outside, Marcus asks how I'm feeling and I tell him I'm feeling sad.

I sit down on the mattress. “I thought we would have gotten farther by now.” When I left the Hospital I thought I would just keep going and going, all the way to Florida. I didn't foresee being so thoroughly beaten by the elements, for my mother to still feel so far away.

“Here's something,” Marcus says. “In a bathroom in West Virginia, I saw a sign telling people to not use toilet water for drinking. There was a drawing of a man dunking his head in the toilet with a big red X over it.”

I laugh and tell him about the recovery position sign I saw in a bathroom, and then he grabs my waist and we take turns rolling each other onto our sides, into the position of recovery. The skin on his arms is cold and gummy. My intestines twist around.

We should be exhausted, tranquilized with sleep, but instead we keep assuming the recovery position. After all, we have so much to recover from. Finally we settle down on the mattress, still quivering with laughter, nearly delirious. We lie on our backs, the sheet tucked under our arms, our feet sticking out. The mattress fabric is printed with pink and green flowers, the stems faded. I pull off the gardening gloves. My fingertips are pruned.

“Right now I don't feel like I will ever be able to move again,” I tell Marcus.

“Tomorrow,” he says. “We'll feel better tomorrow.”

We fall asleep on our backs, our feet hanging over the edge of the mattress, heels touching the floor. We do not dream.

In the morning, Marcus and I wake curled on the mattress. In our sleep, our bodies have taken on new positions. We are facing each other, legs tucked, full of aches and hunger. My tongue is stuck to the roof of my mouth. My stomach makes a rumbling so loud it startles me. The soles of my feet are so blistered and bruised, it looks like they're evolving into something not quite human, concentric circles of dead skin, bright purple blotches.

My toenails are sharp.

I lie awake for a long time before I feel capable of moving. I face away from the window and watch a black beetle scuttle up the wall and think about how this house could be our recovery position.

We find Darcie at the foot of the stairs. Her hair is long and blonde, dark at the roots, the ends tangled in her angel wings. She wants to know about our dreams, but we tell her that we didn't dream anything or at least not anything we can remember.

“Just you wait,” Darcie says.

In the Mansion, it is dry. In the Mansion, we have a place to sleep and it does not cost money. There is food. A mushy piece of fruit. A can of cold tomato soup, opened with a pocketknife, the blade dull with rust. On the second floor, a claw-foot bathtub that can be filled with the rainwater Darcie and Nelson collect in black plastic tubs.

Out there we don't know what will happen to us. The cities are strange, the bus drivers unreliable. We have been temporarily slowed by the needs of the body, the body that doesn't care that my mother is still far away in Florida, that she is still in need of finding. The body that only cares for food, water, sleep.

In the kitchen, we each eat a piece of brown bread and a sour orange. Marcus peels his orange carefully and eats one wedge at a time. I don't take off the skin. I bite right into the peel and juice spills down my chin.

After we finish, Darcie tells us that she wants to give us a tour.

In the living room, one side of the wall is papered with gold leaves. The other side is bare plaster, marked with lines of rust and brown clay that look like streaks of shit. Silver lamps, black with tarnish, sit on the floor. A red velvet armchair with a fist-size hole in the seat stands in a corner. The fabric at the bottom of the chair sags. More holes in the floorboards, the edges splintered. In the center of the ceiling, a skylight. The clouds above are gray and swirling. The fireplace is made of beautiful blue marble, the hearth packed with sticks and leaves and ash.

“This house will play tricks on you,” she says.

We keep looking around. Rain clicks against the skylight. The ceiling darkens and swells.

Darcie bends down, picks up the thin string lying on the floor, and pulls. The trap door that opens is the size of a dumbwaiter. She crouches inside it. Marcus and I move toward her, inspecting. Up close her feathers are dingy and frayed.

“See?” she says from inside the door, raising her hands. She is a woman of average size, but her hands are small as a child's. “Tricks.”

Next we go into the kitchen, to the corner where the walls don't meet in a smooth line, but are separated by a slim column, like a body with an extra feature: a sixth finger, a surplus molar. There's a small hook on the wall, something you'd hang a coat on, and when Darcie pulls the hook, the column, which is some kind of mechanized door, slides open. There is the scent of cedar, a wave of dust.

The last thing she shows us is a little alcove off the living room with shelves built into the walls. The shelves are filled with books of all kinds: hardbacks in their dust jackets, grocery store paperbacks, linen-bound ones that make me think of the books in the Psychologist's bedroom. Marcus and I move around inside the alcove, examining the spines. I pull out a paperback titled
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea.
On the cover there is a submarine descending into the ocean, into the tentacles of the octopus waiting below. When Darcie turns away, I slip the book into my pocket.

Back in the kitchen, a door slams and a man skids into the room. He looks young, like the rest of us, except his hair and eyebrows have already gone silver. His eyes are quick and violet. I can see blue networks of veins and arteries in his wrists and along his pale throat, evidence of a working body. He's wearing a poncho made from a black garbage bag, the plastic beaded with rain.

“Nelson,” Darcie says.

Nelson is holding a toy gun. It has a red handle and a metal barrel. He looks at me and then at Marcus, looks carefully at his rabbit face, as though he's trying to decide which one of us to shoot first.

“These people, they're going to stay with us for a while.” Darcie moves her shoulders in a way that makes her look like a bird fluffing its feathers. Orange pulp has dried around my lips.

Nelson aims the toy gun at me. “Bang!”

I put my hand over my heart, pretend to fall.

“Cops and robbers,” Darcie says. She smiles and claps. “Nelson loves to play cops and robbers.”

*   *   *

On that first morning, the four of us sit on the sticky kitchen floor, holding strips of white cloth soaked in rainwater. We shove the cloth into our mouths and scrub our teeth and gums. We don't say anything. We watch each other disappear into our own strangeness. Hands stretch cheeks, air gushes through nostrils. We scrub and grunt. I can see Marcus's hand pushing around under his mask. I haven't cleaned my teeth since I left the Hospital, haven't done more than swirl tap water around in my mouth. I taste blood on my gums, I feel a warm drip on my bottom lip, but I don't stop for anything.

 

28.

Darcie and Nelson have much to teach us about survival and we are interested in being taught. They know how to purify the rainwater they collect by boiling it on the gas stove. They show us how to make garbage bag jackets of our own and how to take a bath in the claw-foot tub. The porcelain bottom is padded with rust. The first time I clean myself in there, I look down into the red water and think I'm bleeding.

They pull up weeds and eat them. Their favorites are dandelion and thistle and fat hen. They have learned the hard way about what will make them feel sick and what will make them feel well. In the alcove library, they show us a book with drawings called
Wicked Botany.
We turn the pages and I see black-and-white illustrations of spade-shaped leaves drawn in meticulous detail, fibrous roots, blossoms dangling from stems like tiny bells.

They seem to know a lot about the state of Tennessee. Shelby County has more horses than any other county in America. Murfreesboro is the geographical center of the state. In Tennessee, there are over three thousand caves. Lake County is the turtle capital of the world. There is a replica of the Parthenon in Nashville.

I memorize these facts about Tennessee and repeat them to myself on the nights I have trouble sleeping—which is every night.

One afternoon, they lead us away from the Mansion, down a wide dirt road that runs behind a water tower and an abandoned trailer park. Someone has painted an enormous red smiley face on the tower. The trailers are being consumed by moss and vine. The windows are rectangles of green fuzz. They look like they're being absorbed into the earth.

The water tower and the trailer park are surprises in the landscape. In my imagination, we have been situated in the middle of nowhere, with nothing around for many miles. My internal geography adjusts, makes room for these new details.

We have been in the Mansion for three days, time slipping by like a river over stones. In his Laws of the Road, Rick did not mention how long you should stay in any one place before you move on.

On the dirt road, Nelson starts telling us about the twin paradox, one of Einstein's thought experiments.

“Imagine a pair of twins,” he begins, kicking up dust.

This part is not hard for me to do.

One twin is sent on a journey into outer space. The twin experiences a slowing of time and when he returns, he appears younger than the twin who stayed behind, which is the paradox. But in fact two have become three: the twin who stays home, the twin who leaves, and the twin who comes back. The twin who leaves is not the same twin who returns. That is a physical impossibility. Nelson says the experiment has to do with how we change. We go on a journey and we are never the same person when we come home.

I imagine Current Me sitting next to Stop & Shop Me on an MBTA bus. Current Me looks at her with tenderness, touches her cheek, tucks her hair, her still beautiful hair, behind her ear. There is so much this Stop & Shop Me does not yet know. Together the Mes look out at the other passengers and the construction rising from the ground and the people playing pool in Laundry World and the evangelical church, swollen with song. They stop at a red light and that is when Current Me leans in and whispers, One day all of this will be gone.

“I'm doing my own experiments,” Nelson says.

I've gone missing inside myself. I focus on the rhythm of sneakers hitting dirt, the little shocks of energy, and find my way back.

“What kind of experiments?” Marcus is walking beside him, hands deep in his pockets. I notice a dark smudge on his rabbit nose.

“I'm going to find a cure,” Nelson says.

“Is there anything left to cure?” I ask. Deep dirt trenches run along the sides of the road. They look like they've been created by a machine.

“There is everything left to cure,” Darcie says.

We walk by a small construction pit. An orange cement truck is parked next to it, along with low stacks of metal beams, yet it seems like the actual construction never started. There is just a cavernous hole in the earth.

We keep going until we come to a small post office, a square brick building with an American flag and a sign that reads
MICHIE TN
out front. There is nothing else around. No other houses or stores. The window shades are drawn tight.

Is that where we are right now? Michie?