“No,” Karen said. “I don’t think anything like that’s happened to me.”
He looked at her in disbelief.
“I don’t think I’m who you’re thinking of,” Karen said slowly. “When exactly were you there?”
It became clear that he had graduated several years after her: they hadn’t even overlapped. She had a young face for her age, or he had an old one. They stood in the toothpaste-and-Band-Aid aisle feeling uncomfortable. To Karen he was worse than a stranger: she knew with certainty that something weird lurked inside him. He sensed her change in attitude and stuck his hands back in his pockets. “What did you mean, ‘the cultural moment of the sex tape’?” Karen asked. “What did you think would happen if you apologized?” He didn’t seem to hear her. Already he seemed a mile away — he was closing up as she watched.
“What did you do?” Karen asked. She stared at him.
“I don’t remember,” he said unconvincingly. “It was forever ago.”
Karen suddenly realized that she hadn’t thought of her husband at all in more than an hour. Had he thought of her, even once?
The sun was setting behind the crosshatching of oak trees as Karen pushed the empty, tilting stroller toward the café as quickly as she could. The sight of the intent, ferocious-looking woman with the empty stroller alarmed the people she passed, but Karen didn’t notice. She was truly ready to go home. It seemed incredible to her that just a few hours earlier she had thought that staying in that apartment for another second could kill her. Now she knew that she would become irreparably warped if she spent another minute out here. She felt as if she were deep underwater, desperately stroking up toward the surface, toward light and air. She had no idea how far away it might be.
She’d get back to the café, thank Linda for her time, and hurry her baby home. Home was still a safe space. Everything had gone well there in the end. Puldron was alive, he hadn’t choked at all, not completely. And even if he had, the choking was just another corporeal encounter, the body articulating itself around the obstacle of that which choked it. It didn’t mean anything more than that. The word express, derived from the medieval Latin expressare, meant to “press out” or “obtain by squeezing.” The word had once been used figuratively as a term for extortion. It was possible that to cough, to choke, was the root of all speech: the urgent need to evacuate something whose internality threatened to kill you. To express yourself or be expressed by extruding words. It was just a bodily function, like sweating or throwing up. Sometimes you felt relief afterward, but there was no point in doing it unless you had to. In light of this, Lila would speak on her own time, when the small, mild experiences she was accumulating finally coalesced into something she needed to expel.
The past was just a place where uncontrolled freaks you had never consciously decided to include in your life entered it anyway and staggered around, breaking things. Compared to the gentle, competent family she had chosen, they were monsters. Even someone like Linda, seemingly so warm and lively, was an unknown. Though Karen had felt happy and connected after talking to her, when she reflected on their conversation she realized that they had spoken mostly about Linda herself, mostly in glowing terms, without learning anything concrete about her that would make her real. Since graduating from college, since getting engaged and then married, since moving to this new, worse city, Karen had always mourned her growing isolation. She had longed for the unpredictable, haphazard quality that other people had, which she had found beautiful. What seemed more beautiful to her, now, was the new being, unsullied, perfect for now in every way, whose entire existence so far had unfolded under her gaze. Even if Karen was no longer connected to the chain of exhausting events that comprised her past, she could still attach herself to a whole life, pure and complete, in the form of her innocent, silent daughter. Her daughter would live whole inside her mind, inside her memory, forever.
As she rounded the corner to the block where she would find the café, Karen saw that something had gone on. In the vivid blue dusk, swaths of a brighter blue alternated with hot red, electrifying the trunks of trees and sides of buildings. A few people milled around, talking; others walked past as though everything were just as it should be. With a terrifying expression on her face, Karen ran with the ugly stroller, her feet festooned with Band-Aids, toward police cars up ahead.
As she came close, she saw, first, a policewoman with a short blond ponytail, then her partner, who had a notepad, and then a potbellied man explaining something to him with vigorous gestures. She saw the vehicles double-parked by the entrance to the café where the lights were on and the barista slid a rag along the counter. There was no sign of Linda, or of her garish pinks and greens: Linda was gone. The light was ending. And then, in the arms of a policeman, standing in the yellow sheet of light cast by the streetlamp that had just come on, she saw Lila, she saw her baby. She squirmed gently, held by a stranger. Linda had left her there, gone about her own business. With a shudder, Karen thought of the stranger’s hands, the strange hot arms.
Inside the baby, something was taking shape. There were colors and planes, indistinct, as if viewed through a thick layer of water. There was dimness and cold, the unmoored perception of bright blue and red, flashing. The baby watched as her mother came toward her with a face full of terror. The two eyes large and wild, the mouth pouring. With her gentle mind, the baby took the face in and waited, waited as it sank slowly to the top of a pile of things without names, waited for the noisy world to become still once more. It was all collecting inside there, gathering like dust, building, building up, until someday there would be enough for some part to pierce the surface of her silence and gasp out a piece of what lay beneath.
Jellyfish
She was truly happy for the first time in her life, and it felt just like living in a small room painted all white, with windows looking out onto impenetrable forest. It didn’t bother her when she had to walk past strangers unwashed in the middle of the day or when she forgot a newly bought bag of groceries on the subway seat. Crossing the street, she paused to look up at an airplane etching a thin white stroke in the sky and was nearly hit by a taxi. Though it had been over a year, she staggered through the world like one freshly bludgeoned by love.
Now they were at a resort hotel by the beach, though the beach was really a five-minute drive away. All they had here was a forty-foot strip of damp sand visible during lowest tide, and a staircase that led directly into the sea. Karen looked down at the blue water frothing against the last visible stair. The water had a mouthwash color, something usually achieved through dye, making everything look unreal, retouched, staged somehow. Seeing her own hands foregrounded against this blue filled her with the sensation of dreaming, in the moments just before you wake up. Off in the far distance fishing boats floated at the horizon line, the only indication that this country had a real economy of its own, separate from the all-inclusive resorts that lined this stretch of land, which resembled utopian communes but operated secretly under cutthroat capitalist principles.
The water was cool, and looked as clear as a glass of water: you could see shells strewn on the ocean floor. But the unusually hot weather had caused jellyfish to multiply unchecked. They populated the shallows, a slight distortion in the shifting, flashing patterns of sunlight on sand. Beachgoers descended the staircase to steep their bodies in the tropical blue, but once they got out into the sea they stopped, looking down and moving around nervously, a few steps to the left, then to the right. One woman was stuck in waist-deep water, crying, her face deeply pink. She kept wiping it with short, rough motions that looked like slaps. Over and over she turned back toward the staircase, but she was too far away. The man she had come with was several feet away, doing the breaststroke in tight circles. “You have to kick their heads,” he shouted to her. “Kick them out of your way!”