How They Were Found (9 page)

Her baby is a bird, mottled with gray and brown feathers that will last only as long as its infancy, when it will molt into splendor. Its mouth is open wide, waiting expectantly. Sometimes when she lies still in her quiet apartment, she can hear cawing from her round belly. She has cravings, contemplates eating quarters, little bits of tin foil, even a pair of silver earrings. She hopes her baby is building a beautiful nest inside of her. She wants to give it everything it needs so that it might never leave. Nest as lie, as false hope. Her baby is a bird of prey, something she has never been this close to before. All those talons. All that beak. It hooks her, devours her. They're both so hungry. She eats and eats. Before this, she never knew birds had tongues.

Her baby is a knife. A dagger. A broadsword, sharp and terrible. Her baby is a dangerous thing and she knows that if she isn't careful then one day it will hurt her, hurt others. When it kicks, she feels its edges pressed against the walls of its sheath, drawing more blood in a sea of blood. She is careful when she walks not to bump into things, not to put herself in harm's way. She wonders how it will hurt to push it from her body, to have the doctor tug her baby out of her as from a stone.

Her baby is a furred thing, alternately bristled and then soft. She hopes it isn't shedding, wonders how she'll ever get all that hair out of her if it is. She searches online for images of badgers and then wolverines, looking for something to recognize in their faces. She types the words
creatures that burrow
, then adds a question mark and tries again. The baby is so warm inside her, curled in on itself, waiting for winter to end, for a day to come when all the breath it's been holding can finally be expelled, like heat fogging the air of a still cold morning. Sometimes, when the baby rolls over and makes itself known, she can almost smell it.

Now the water breaking. Now the dilation of the cervix. Now the first real contraction, more potent than any of the false warnings she experienced before. Now the worry that this is too early, that she hasn't learned yet what her baby is supposed to be. Now the lack of thought and the loss of discernible time. Now the pain, which is sharp and dull and fast and slow, which is both waves and particles at the same time. Now the hurry, the burst into motion after the near year of waiting. Now the push, the pushing, the rushing stretch of her suddenly elastic body expanding to do this thing, to give birth to this baby. Now the joke, the seed, the stone, the storm, the bird, the sword. Now the tiny mammal, warm-blooded and hot and yes, now the head covered in wet hair. Now the shoulders, now the torso and the arms. Now the hipbones and the thighs and the knees and the feet. Now the first breath. Now the eyes opening. Now the cry, calling out to her like déjà vu, like the recognition of someone from a dream.

Now the baby.

Now the baby.

Now the baby, an event repeating for the rest of her life.

Her baby is a boy. Her baby is a girl. Her baby is potential energy changing to kinetic, is a person gaining momentum. Her baby is a possibility, or, rather, a string of possibilities and potentialities stretching forward from her toward something still unknowable. With the baby in her arms, she smiles. She coos. She tells her baby that it can be whatever it wants to be. She tells her baby that no matter what it turns out to be, she will always recognize it when it comes back to her. There is no shape that could hide her baby from her, no form that would make her turn her back on it. She says this like a promise, swears it like she can make it true, like it's just that easy. Some days, no matter what she says, her baby cries and cries and cries. 

ACCORDING TO TEACHER, THERE IS ONLY ONE RULE, AND IT IS THIS: No matter what happens, hold on to your vacuum. We have each been given one, each a different shape and size according to our needs. My own vacuum is bright red and bulky, as heavy as a ten-year-old, its worn cord slipping through my fingers like the tail of a rodent, thick and rubbery and repugnant. I start to complain, but Teacher holds up a hand and silences me.

Teacher says, This is the vacuum that was assigned to you, and the only one you’ll be allowed to play with.

I don't know this man's actual name or title, whether he's referee or judge or umpire, but he reminds me of the man who taught my eighth-grade science class. He has the same balding hair pulled into a ponytail, the same small gold crucifix earring, and when he smiles he shows the same small yellow teeth pocked by smoke and sweets. I only know he’s in charge because he's the one standing on the stage of the auditorium while the rest of us wait in the front row below. Because he's the only one of us without a vacuum of his own.

After my complaint, there are no other questions, and so Teacher says, I promise to count to at least one hundred before I come looking for you.

He says, I promise to look for you as long as you need me to, and then he says, Go.

As soon as Teacher finishes talking, the other players reach for their own vacuum cleaners and lug them up the aisle stairs, then out of the auditorium and into the lobby. From there, some move further into the building and some through the double glass doors into the world waiting outside, but why each person chooses one or the other is unclear to me. One girl is tall and thin and agile, her tiny hand vac fitting perfectly into her grip as she bounds out the door and across the parking lot. I follow her as far as the sidewalk, my hand resting on top of my own vacuum. Watching her run, I don’t know where I should go or what I should do. This is only the first turn, and although Teacher has explained that the game is like hide and seek, I don't yet understand. I don't know what the rewards are for success, or what the punishment for failure might be.

I blink once and then Teacher is behind me. Before I can move, his arm shoots around my neck and pulls me into a wrestler’s headlock, his grip strong and sure. His lips are beside my ear, the hairs of his moustache and beard tickling my face as he says, I thought I told you to run.

As he says, You’re too stupid to be brave, so why didn’t you run?

When his other hand comes into view, there is a cordless drill in its grip. The drill is matte black and dull yellow, loaded with a foot-long bit spinning at full speed. Teacher cocks my head and angles the drill downward into the crown of my skull. He pushes it in, past skin and bone, and then I scream and then I can’t remember why I’m screaming and then I’m gone.

I’m carrying the vacuum again, trudging across a farm field full of snow toward the other side, where several rows of dark trees clumped between the snow and the cloudy sky might hide my red vacuum from the exposure of the open field. My lungs burn and my arms ache but I never question the necessity of lugging the vacuum everywhere I go. It is the only rule and so I follow it.

Once beneath the trees, I drag the vacuum over the blanketing floor of pine needles. Heading deeper into the woods, I find a tight bunch of pines whose boughs create a natural shelter into which I tuck myself and my vacuum. I expect to be hidden, to be safe, but I am not alone.

On the ground at my feet is a wounded deer, surrounded by a bloody halo of snow originating from the bullet hole tunneled through its chest. Rather than let go of the vacuum, I transfer its handle to my right hand as I kneel beside the deer. There is a knife in the snow, and because I don't know what else to do, I pick it up and hold it, looking over at the deer’s still form, at the steam still rising from its blood. I think I know what I am supposed to do, but I don’t know if I can do it.

I place the knife against the breastbone but can't bring myself to make the cut. I try again and fail again. This is why I never went hunting with my father or my brothers, at least not after the first time. I turn away, leaving the deer and the knife where I found them. When I step out from the press of the tree branches, Teacher’s waiting for me, a thin smile on his face.

He says, You weren't able to do it before either, so nothing to feel bad about.

Then there is the drill. Then there is the end of my turn.

A new turn begins, in a high school locker room where I'm surrounded by other players, three boys in nothing but boxer shorts with vacuums of their own, giant shop vacs, low and squat on squeaky wheels. I'm naked before them, one hand on my vacuum and one on my crotch.

The biggest of the boys says, Want to get to your locker, don’t you?

Probably pretty ashamed of that little prick. Needs to put his panties on.

Show us what you’ve got and I’ll let you pass. I promise.

This boy, his vacuum is bigger than the others, and also an unmistakable hue of pink.

I know he’s not telling the truth. Whatever happens, someone is definitely going to get hurt.

The boys continue to taunt me, and right before I know I’m about to give in, to just get it over with, the door to the locker room slams open, and in comes Teacher. He smiles, all his little crowded teeth gleaming victorious in the fluorescence.

We scatter, but he's too fast, the scene too disorienting. The drill enters the bullies first, but eventually it comes for me too.

There is a turn where my father bails me out of jail and then there is the drill. Where my mother finds my slim pornography stash, the drill coming as she tells me who it was that molested her and how she’s afraid I’m going to grow up to be like him. I call a boy in the second grade a nigger even though I don’t know what the word means. The drill enters through my cheek so that I can feel it spinning inside my mouth before it angles upward toward my brain. These turns I never hear Teacher coming, never see him except as a hand holding a weapon.

The line between voyeur and participant blurs. I open a bathroom door and see my babysitter partially naked, squatting with her pants around her ankles, changing her tampon. This is years before I even know what that is. I back out quickly, yelling apologies, my vacuum clunking against the doorframe. Later I will reenact an early masturbation attempt, one hand on myself and the other on the vacuum's handle as I picture the triangle of pubic hair between her legs. The drill bit finds me right before I orgasm. It is a long time before I see another player again, and when I do I can’t help wondering if I'm playing against them or beside them, if we are rivals or on the same team. It’s hard to know. My only companion comes via the one rule:
Hold on to your vacuum
. It goes everywhere with me, a conjoined twin or else a tumor made of Chinese plastic and rubber belts.

I grow calmer, more accepting of the drill, like a child who learns to take his medicine no matter how bad it tastes: I'm in a house, behind Teacher now, stalking him for once. A new kind of turn. Teacher climbs a staircase, seemingly unaware of my presence behind him. At the top of the stairs, he enters the first room on the left and closes the door behind him. I follow, dragging the red vacuum as quietly as possible. I don’t have the strength anymore to lift it over the stairs, but I do drag it as quietly as possible, easing it over the carpeted hump of each step. At the top, I remember an old trick I used to play on my younger siblings. I tie one end of my vacuum cord around the handle of the door Teacher’s behind, one to the closed door across the hall. When I open the door on the other side and lower its doorstop, it pulls the cord tight, making it impossible to move either door. I stand in the hallway and wait for Teacher to try to escape. Fifteen minutes pass and still I resolve to be patient. I sit on the floor, cradling my vacuum, rocking it in my arms. It is heavy, far heavier than it was before, and it stinks of burning rubber and fried dust. Impatient, I press my ear against Teacher's door, listening, and by the time I hear the drill bit chewing through the door, it’s too late to move. Not that I would. I cry out as the bit clears the wood and hits my temple, but only in relief. My hippocampus must be shredded wheat by now and still I crave more, more, more.

Most turns I’m somewhere I don’t want to be, someplace I’ve been once and wouldn’t willingly revisit. I’m a child, making up a story about a man trying to abduct me just to make my mother feel bad for leaving me in the car alone while she paid for her gas. The vacuum’s on the floor of the car between my chubby little legs, Teacher’s in the back seat cleaning his glasses. I come to the worst lie I ever told my wife and it is one of the lowest moments of my life. Even though she never thought to doubt me, it is still terrible living through it again.

Once in a while, the turns bring me to rarer moments, like my college graduation or my wedding day. Moments where my parents or friends or my wife told me they loved me and were proud of me. Moments where a handshake or a hug or a kiss is interrupted by the drill bit battering down the doors of my skull. These are the times I scream the loudest, that I struggle against the bit’s insistence, but Teacher has the steady hand of a surgeon or else an assassin. Of all the players in the game, only he seems constantly sure of his role.

Now there is a turn that is fully recognizable as my own memory, turned into what I know is another game board, another level. I'm at a party when I'm eighteen or nineteen. Everyone is drunk, and everyone has their vacuum with them. I keep drinking, leaning against my vacuum for support, talking to a blonde girl in a miniskirt for hours. She tells me about her boyfriend who’s away at school and I keep pressing, trying too hard but still we end up in a bedroom upstairs, both of us barely conscious, our vacuums leaned against the bed, our bodies tangled in their cords.

I kiss her and she says, I don’t know about this.

I answer by kissing her again.

My hand moves under her skirt, the part of me that is playing the game mimicking the part of me that is a memory.

This is not something I think of often.