In the basement, the ritual starts with Darcie putting four drops of a sweet-smelling liquid under her tongue. It’s something Nelson has given her, to help her remember, to help her become fully cured. On her own, she discovered that if she takes the drops and goes into the tunnel, she can hear things. Like voices. Like her mother’s voice.
“The first time it was an accident,” she tells us. “I didn’t even know there was a tunnel down here. I was just doing what Nelson said I should do. I was just wandering around and trying to remember.”
The liquid in the eyedropper is clear as water. It looks like a serious drug, like GHB or ketamine, which I have never taken before, because being dead and wanting to feel dead are not the same thing. In Mission Hill, I heard stories about girls getting drugged with GHB and waking up half-naked in backyards and in parks and in parking lots, always outdoors it seemed, only they didn’t call it GHB. It was Cherry Meth or Easy Lay or Grievous Bodily Harm.
“Hm.” I flick a finger at the eyedropper. “I’ve seen the end of that movie.”
“What movie?” Darcie says.
I’m scared of this liquid, but just because it is not something I would have taken before, in the land where there was an endless supply of cough syrup and no mother to reach, doesn’t mean I wouldn’t be willing to do it now.
“You sure you don’t want some company in there?” I do the same finger-flick at the steel door.
“In the tunnel, there is no such thing as company,” Darcie says.
She squeezes the liquid into her mouth. Next she takes off her clothes. She pulls her sweater over her head, unzips her pants. She has nothing on underneath. She doesn’t blush or turn away. She is not shy around us. I can see the fine bones in her back and the strange shape of her kneecaps. Her nipples are pinpricks of brown.
It’s cold in the basement. Cobwebs sag from the ceiling like dead skin.
We can’t help it. We stare at Darcie.
“I told you there was a ritual,” she says, as though that explains everything.
We watch her open the steel door and slip inside the tunnel. She’s gone for a long time. I look at Marcus and imagine him naked in the basement. I see his long thighs and the tight mass of his balls. The strangeness of a masked face against all that hairless skin. I pick up the eyedropper and look at the residue inside. It smells like nothing.
“I want to go in there,” I say to Marcus.
“I remember my mother well enough,” he says. “I don’t need to hear her voice.”
“Speak for yourself,” I say.
In a corner, we find a plastic baby doll with a missing arm and a dark bow-shaped mouth. We take turns putting on Darcie’s wings. I walk around the basement with the weight of them on my back. We wait for the door to open and for Darcie to come out and tell us all about what she’s heard in there.
When the door finally creaks open and Darcie spills into the basement, she’s crying. Her hair is stuck to her cheeks. She crosses her arms over her stomach and shivers.
“What’s wrong?” we want to know.
I pick up her sweater and try handing it to her. Above us there is the rumble of falling pins. “Did you not hear her?”
“Sometimes you don’t hear what you wish you would,” Darcie says.
*
One night, in the living room, Darcie tells us about this idea she has for a city with only one building. When we point out that a city with only one building can’t really be considered a city, she says we don’t understand.
We are taking turns drinking from the green bottle. The oil lamp is stationed on the floor and I watch an ant crawl through the circle of light. It looks injured.
“Everything cities have would exist in this one building.” Darcie reaches into the fireplace. She finds a stick and starts drawing her city in the air. A large moth touches down on a lamp shade, then flies over to a window and beats the glass with its wings.
“The building would be so tall, it would reach the stratosphere. That’s between the troposphere and the mesosphere, in case you didn’t know. It would hold millions of people, no, billions, billions of people, and roads and schools and police stations and museums and train stations and airports and restaurants.”
“That sounds crowded,” Marcus says.
“It’s a stupid idea for a city.” Nelson reaches for the bottle, his pale arm thrusting into the light.
Babylon, I think, imagining a stone tower ascending into the clouds. Where have I heard about Babylon before?
“No one would ever be lost,” Darcie says, as though she hasn’t heard our misgivings. She gets the bottle next.
“Imagine this instead,” Nelson tells us, taking over.
He tells us to imagine getting so tangled up inside yourself that you would do anything for a way out. To imagine the lure of forgetting, of wiping it all away. He tells us that what separates us from animals is not logical thought but our ability to set our own traps. What if we could get away from all that? None of the infected remember how they contracted the sickness—how could they? The sickness was designed to erase who we were. Who could say how it all started?
“It started with Clara Sue Borden.” I slurp from the green bottle and feel the words turn to syrup in my mouth. “Everyone knows that. It started with California.”
“Imagine,” Nelson says, raising a finger. “That this is something we did to ourselves.”
Rain beats the skylight. I hear scratching in the walls.
“Take Darcie here,” he continues. By now Darcie has forgotten all about her city with only one building. She is lying on the floor. The tops of her wings are brushing her ears. Her mouth is open. Her eyes look wet and empty. “The trick was getting her so far outside herself that she was able to stand back and see that she could still remember, could always remember. That she could see that she was well.”
On the floor, Darcie does not look well.
“I went to an official place, to try and talk to official people, but no one wanted to hear about it.”
“Where?” I put the green bottle down. I feel a shiver of curiosity.
“Where what?”