Julian is quiet. The rhythm of his breathing has grown steady.
“She used to play games with me too,” I say.
“She did?” Julian’s voice has a touch of awe in it.
“Yeah. Real games, too, not just the development stuff they advocate in The Book of Shhh. She used to pretend…” I stop, biting my lip, worried I’ve gone too far.
“Pretend what?”
There’s a crazy pressure building in my chest, and now all of it is coming back, my real life, my old life—the rickety house in Portland and the sound of the water and the smell of the bay; the blackened walls of the Crypts and the emerald-green diamond patterns of the sun slanting through the trees in the Wilds; all these other selves, stacked one on top of another and buried, so that no one will ever find them. And suddenly I feel I have to keep talking; if I don’t, I will explode. “She had a key she pretended would unlock doors to other worlds. It was just a regular key—I don’t know where she got it, some garage sale, probably—but she kept it in a red box and only brought it out on special occasions. And when she did, we would pretend to go traveling through all these different dimensions. In one world, animals kept humans as pets; in another, we could go riding on the tails of shooting stars. There was an underwater world, and one where people slept all day and danced all night. My sister played too.”
“What was her name?”
“Grace,” I say. My throat is squeezing up, and now I’m combining selves and places, combining lives. My mom disappeared before Grace was even born; besides, Grace was my cousin. But strangely, I can picture it: my mother lifting Grace, swooping her around in an enormous circle while music piped from the fuzzy speakers; the three of us galloping down the long wooden hallways, pretending to be catching a star. I open my mouth to say more, but find I can’t. I am on the verge of crying, and have to swallow back the feeling, hard, while my throat spasms.
Julian is quiet for a minute. Then he says, “I used to pretend things too.”
“Yeah?” I turn my face into my pillow so the trembling in my voice will be muffled.
“Yeah. In the hospitals, mostly, and the labs.” Another beat. “I used to pretend that I was back at home. I’d change the noises into other things, you know? Like the beeping of the heart monitors—that was actually just the ‘beep-beep-beep’ of the coffee machine. And when I heard footsteps I would pretend they were my parents’, even though they never were; and I would pretend the smell—you know how hospitals always smell like bleach, and just a little bit like flowers?—was because my mother was washing the sheets.”
The clenching in my throat has subsided, and I can breathe more easily now. I’m grateful to Julian; for not saying that my mother’s behavior seems unregulated, for not being suspicious or asking too many questions. “Funerals smell like that too,” I say. “Like bleach. Like flowers, too.”
“I don’t like that smell,” Julian says quietly. If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat. He says, “I used to pretend to be an explorer, too. I used to think about what it would be like to go to … other places.”
I think of finding him after the DFA meeting: sitting alone in the dark, staring up at those dizzying images of mountains and woods.
“Like where?” I ask, my heart speeding up a bit.
He hesitates. “Just around,” he says finally. “Like to other cities in the USA.”
Something tells me he’s lying again; I wonder if he was really talking about the Wilds, or other places in the world—the unbordered places, where love still exists, where it was supposed to have consumed everyone by now.
Maybe Julian senses that I don’t believe him, because he rushes on. “It was just kid stuff. The kind of stuff I did on overnights to the labs, when I had tests and procedures and things like that. So I wouldn’t be scared.”
In the silence, I can feel the weight of the earth above our heads: layers and layers of it, airless and heavy. I try to fight off the feeling that comes to me: We will be buried here forever. “Are you scared now?” I ask.
He pauses for just a fraction of a second. “I’d be more scared if I were alone,” he says.
“Me too,” I say. Again, I feel a rush of sympathy for him. “Julian?”
“Yeah?”
“Reach out your hand.” I’m not sure what makes me say it—maybe it’s the fact that I can’t see him. It feels easier with him in the dark.
“For what?”