Singing With All My Skin and Bone Page 7

  It’s like the Hot Zone of social media. Because that’s what it is, isn’t it? It’s a giant data quarantine.

  They scrubbed the net as clean as they could. They sent in people to confiscate hard drives of all sizes. We’re pretty sure they got it all. Once the archive was established, a lot of us voluntarily turned over what we had and deleted everything else. We organized around it. We surprised people, and we baffled people. They didn’t understand.

  Well, whatever. They don’t need to.

  The situation is less than ideal, but that was true from the beginning. That was true before the Year. That’s always been true.

  *

  I go out to dinner with some friends from my program, and as I’m texting them from the restaurant where I’ve arrived early, I realize that it’s my favorite sushi place and I haven’t been here in five months, and these are the only remaining friends I ever see face to face and I haven’t seen any of them in almost as long.

  And I realize I’m only now realizing that, and I think Huh.

  It’s a vague kind of dinner, and that’s mostly on my end. They talk about work, about the projects they’ve hooked up with, about their own dissertations. Kayla has a gig at a marketing firm, which is going well. Mike also got that grant I was awarded and we high five.

  All these common things that tied us together since the first year in the program are still there, but as the evening proceeds it becomes apparent that there are new things in which I don’t and can’t share. Mike got that grant; Mike and his husband are also about to adopt a baby. Lissa is getting married in a couple of months and the planning for that is in full swing. With her spot at the firm, Kayla is thinking she might be able to get a down payment on a house in the not-too-distant-future.

  And I’m just listening.

  So what have you been up to? What you got going on?

  Well, after this I’m probably going to go back to my basement apartment and leaf through a binder full of notes I took while I watched fifty-five kids aged thirteen through nineteen erase their faces with shotguns.

  So I got that going on.

  Sitting there, staring down at my tuna rolls, I feel like darkness is creeping across the table and it’s carving me apart from them. Once we used to go out and drink until we were practically falling down, to ease the pain of endless unendurable lectures. We were united by cheerful misery, and there was something wonderful about that union. It felt full and alive.

  They moved on. They moved forward. They have lives. But every time I touch this thing I’m getting dragged backward.

  And I’m not so sure about alive anymore.

  *

  Kayla calls me the next morning. I have an incredible hangover. Not the worst in a while, though, and not from dinner. I came home after, I leafed through the binder, and I drank until I passed out on top of it.

  I just want to make sure you’re okay.

  Sure, I’m okay. Why wouldn’t I be okay?

  You seemed kind of. She doesn’t finish that sentence, and I can’t tell if it’s because she doesn’t want to or she doesn’t know how. I dunno, I just. We hadn’t heard from you in a while, and I just wanted to check in.

  Check in. Fuck’s sake, I’m fine. She’s not my mother, I have a mother. I haven’t spoken to her in about three weeks, but I still have one.

  Kayla’s voice drops. Look, you know…You have this thing, and everyone thinks it’s kind of…Just don’t disappear, okay? You remember. You remember what it was like.

  Suddenly she sounds so gentle, and my throat closes up, and I remember the one time she and I got so drunk and so comfortable with each other that a week after meeting for the first time we were sitting in a bar yelling to each other about our worst sexual experiences practically at the top of our lungs.

  That was a little over six years after the Year. We were healing but we were all still hurting. We needed each other.

  Yes, Kayla, I remember.

  Do you?

  *

  I have stacks of binders and I have stacks of highlighters and I have stacks of pens and I have no idea what to do with any of them anymore. I work all the time, but then I stop working and I stare at it and I think, What exactly is all this? Who left it here? Who would do this?

  Why?

  I have a year left.

  *

  My grant runs out.

  *

  It didn’t take us very long to stop looking for answers.

  Other people, people outside the trenches—sure, they kept looking. They were desperate. They never stopped looking until things began to taper off and then even after. For a while. Then they did stop. No one officially called off the search. They just…stopped.

  But we stopped long before that.

  Because the why didn’t matter. We didn’t have the luxury of why. We didn’t have the time or the effort to expend on why. I’m not saying we didn’t wonder. Everyone wondered. But after the initial flood of panic, after it became clear that it wasn’t stopping, that it was only getting worse, we turned inward and we did what no one else seemed able to do.

  We took care of each other.

  We stayed in contact. We formed networks of information-sharing and retooled existing ones, and we pooled our resources. We sent people to homes, to sit with and comfort and be with people who were lonely and scared. We helped people in bad situations get out of them. We raised money. We ran seminars and workshops. We got medication to people who needed it. We did highly organized damage control.

  We were doing all that before the Year even happened. All the Year did was kick it into high gear.

  There did come a point—and it didn’t take, thank Christ—where they were talking seriously about going to the sources and shutting everything down. Taking it all away from us.

  The death toll was already horrifying. Believe me when I tell you: You don’t even want to think about what it might have been.

  *

  Sitting with my binders and my highlighters and my pencils and my pens in the dark, looking at my phone on the coffee table. Little screen blinks on. Buzz. Blinks off. Green-purple rectangle, floating in the air in front of me like a ghost.

  Blinks on. Buzz. Blinks off.

  It’s just an alarm. I haven’t actually spoken to anyone, in any sense of the term, in over a week.

  All these binders full of the dead. All these binders of me in and among and with them. So what does that make me?

  *

  Here’s how it was: We were dying. But we weren’t alone.

  Suddenly we all knew each other. Suddenly we were all friends. We were all family. Across media and networks and apps and sites and everything you can think of. Sure, some things got seriously ugly, but by the time it became clear what we were dealing with, for the most part people laid down their arms. Truces and ceasefires were declared. We had bigger things to worry about.

  We were dying.

  I loved those people. I loved every one of them. The people I never met. The people whose names and faces I never knew until I was watching them kill themselves. The people who mourned for them and invited me to mourn with them. We said we loved each other. We all said it. Over and over. Like hands across a chasm, groping in the dark. Knowing that, in the end, we probably couldn’t save anyone. All we could do was be there until they were gone, and be with whoever was left.

  I remember how it was. I remember it. I remember it so well. I’m drowning in remembering.

  Not very shareable.

  I love you. I love you.

  I love you.

  *

  After it was over, I was lonelier than I had ever been in my entire life.

  *

  My notes are in chaos. My coding is an incoherent mess. None of it makes any sense at all, and I’m not sure it ever did. I have no idea how to organize this into something that could even begin to vaguely resemble something defensible.

  I have six months. But that time-to-completion was just an estimate. My advisor is
very hands-off. No one is holding me to that deadline but me.

  In theory, I suppose, I could just stay here.

  *

  So there I am.

  *

  I don’t know how long I stare at it. I know my back starts to hurt and my mouth is dry, and my eyes itch and my head aches, but I’m pretty sure that was all already the case. I sit under those college-library overhead lights and I stare at the screen and it doesn’t matter how long I do that because it doesn’t change and it isn’t going to.

  The little clock in the corner of the screen says ten minutes to midnight. I think maybe it’s said that for a while.

  There I am.

  It’s a grainy selfie. Poorly lit. It’s been put through a filter which has done it no favors. The colors are all fucked and it’s hard to make out anything clearly, but I can see enough.

  I’m sitting on the floor in front of the coffee table. I can’t see the coffee table but I know it’s there, just beyond where the phone is. I’m staring into the camera. I have no discernable expression.

  I’m not holding the phone.

  *

  We want to wrap things up neatly. We want to come out the other side and look back and be able to make sense of it all. We want to beat fear and pain and loss into narrative submission; this explains the persistence of war stories, and the persistence of their telling.

  We record, we write our histories, we analyze and we theorize, we editorialize, we engage in punditry. We publish. We curate and we archive. We do this because we have to, because we can’t just leave it all there. We can’t just look down at that endless mass of corpses and let that be the last word.

  We can’t leave the holes in the world.

  I wish I could tell you something. I wish I could give you an answer. But in the end no answer could have made any difference. And the questions we were left with never mattered.

  All we ever had was each other.

  Event Horizon

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays we go to feed the house.

  Zhan takes me. We walk down the cracked sidewalk, hopping the places where the cracks are almost chasms. At points we have to push through high weeds. We go in the middle of the day when the sun is a hammer beating on your head and it’s too hot for the flies to buzz. There’s hardly anyone outside then and never anyone down this end of Pine Street, which is probably the only reason we can come and feed the house at all.

  Because if the rest of them had their way they’d just let it starve.

  Can you starve a house? I asked Zhan once, and he just spat tobacco at me and smirked. It was a stupid question and I know that now. Of course you can starve a house. You can starve anything that’s alive.

  Zhan flips his shaggy black hair back from his face, huffs out a laugh at nothing in particular. Zhan is three years older than me and all angles and he doesn’t know I’m in love with him.

  In my mind, all three of those things are of equal importance. In my mind, none of them can exist independently of the others.

  Zhan has two squirrels in a steel box trap under his arm. They scurry back and forth and rattle the wire mesh on the ends. I can feel their panic. Once it would have bothered me but I’m over that now. I’m focused ahead, trying not to trip over anything but also because I want to see the house the second that seeing it is possible. I don’t want it sneaking up on me. It keeps up the appearance of dormancy but we know that it’s like any predator; it only seems passive when it has to.

  “Step it up, Tom.” Zhan glances back over his shoulder and speeds up a little. We’re not supposed to be here. If we’re seen by an adult nosy enough we’ll get busted for truancy and they’d probably want to know what we were going to do with the squirrels. I move faster, grass whispering around my ankles.

  Then I see it.

  It’s two stories. There’s a porch running around its front and a little way onto the sides. Its blue paint has faded and peeled until it’s almost gray. Its front yard is dead and brown. The four front windows—two on each floor—are broken. They’re black holes. We’ve never seen what’s inside. We’ve never gotten close enough to do so. A rusty PRIVATE PROPERTY KEEP OUT sign hangs crooked on the wire mesh fence but that’s not why we hang back.

  Zhan and I stand there for a few minutes. The squirrels are still and silent, and I know without looking that it isn’t because they’re afraid. They’re beyond fear.

  Finally Zhan drops into a crouch and sets down the trap, points the front at the gap where the gate used to be before it rusted off its hinges. He opens the trap. I lose the fight against the shiver that wants to roll through me; there’s sweat trickling down between my shoulder blades, but that’s not where the shiver is coming from.

  The house is staring at me. At both of us.

  The squirrels walk out of the trap. They aren’t moving in that funny little hop that squirrels do. They’re walking, one foot in front of the other, stiff. They’re little squirrel zombies. They walk through the gate without hesitation, up the broken pavement of the front path and right up to the door.

  Here’s the thing about the door: It’s there. And it’s not.

  They walk right up to it and through it. It never opens.

  No sound. No movement.

  “Every fuckin’ time,” Zhan murmurs. I nod.

  Zhan picks up the trap. We back away. Twenty yards clear and we turn and walk back the way we came. Neither of us says a word.

  *

  The house has always been there. Or it was there when we moved here, which was before I can remember anything, so as far as I’m concerned that’s always.

  Zhan and I have been friends since I was old enough to have friends and he’s been my hero since I was old enough to have heroes. A lot of this is because he accepted me from the first when a lot of other kids laughed and called names and threw rocks and never gave me a moment’s peace at school—most particularly the ever-present trio of Kyle Patterson, who has hated me for reasons of his own since the third grade, Jake McDonnell, who’s his best friend, and Drew Carter, who usually just tags along because he has nothing better to do—because of my hair and the clothes I insisted on wearing and how I bristled every time anyone called me her. I could never have explained to them why I wanted these things; they just felt right in a world that was nothing but wrong. But Zhan, if he didn’t understand, at least accepted without question or complaint. For Zhan, I just was. I am.

  Like the house.

  I was ten when Zhan first took me to the house. He had caught a neighbor’s cat, a mangy thing that always came after us with claws fully extended. It hissed and yowled in the trap but then it walked through the front gate and we never saw it again.

  Zhan swore me to secrecy. I swore.

  That was three years ago. In those three years Zhan has never answered any of my questions, not where it came from, what it really is, how he found out about it, or whether or not we could kill it. I think if there were answers, Zhan would give them to me.

  Later in the woods, after we’ve fed the house, he sticks a hot dog into fire we made in a ring of stones and holds it out to me when it’s split down the middle and steaming. The light is touching his face with soft, shifting fingers. I look at him and I hope—oh, God, I hope—that he can’t see what I’m thinking.

  I knew I was in love with Zhan a year after he showed me the house. I think the house is why it happened. He shared a secret with me. It made me want to share all of mine.

  *

  It’s getting tough to do the twice-a-week-sneaking-out thing.

  Back in summer it was easier. We could get away for entire days, spend the morning tossing a baseball back and forth in the dusty lot two blocks from our street, check the traps, feed the house, and devote the rest of the afternoon to shooting crows with an air rifle from the bushes that surround the parking lot of the Los Vientos industrial park. In the summer it’s pretty empty so no one runs us off. But I think Zhan always enjoys that part more than I do.

  Reg
ardless, it’s not summer anymore. School’s back in session, never mind how hot it is and will be for at least two more months, and it’s not all that hard to go truant from lunch with all of us crowded into the blacktop yard—blasting heat at us—but we’re running a little bit of a risk every time.

  Thank Christ no one really cares. That fucking dyke and her faggot friend. Neither of us is especially popular, so okay, we have each other.

  We have each other. I love how that sounds.

  Here we are again. This time it’s three chipmunks, walking in stately procession up the path. Zhan and I are standing close enough to touch. I glance at him—it always feels hard to look away from the house, dangerous even, but I can manage it for him—and for the first time I wonder How much longer are we going to do this?

  What would happen if we stopped?

  I don’t know why Zhan started feeding the house. But in bed that night I start thinking about that steady plod all the animals do up to that not-there door. And I think about how hard it is to look away from the house, how hard it is to even keep from going there, the way we’ll get around almost any obstacle to do it.

  It calls us.

  I fall asleep thinking about it there in the dark, alive, hungry, waiting for the next time we bring it meat.

  *

  I dream about it. It’s not a good dream.

  I’m standing where Zhan and I always stand, looking at the house. But it’s not like it usually is. We never go to the house after dark but it’s dark now, starless and moonless. And I’m alone.