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.”