But didn’t Rome fall? I heard myself ask. I recall it crumbling.
Look at our Daughter, recalling things! And they smiled at me with their eyes. Please don’t worry about a little mental reshuffling here and there. A little rearranging in your head.
I thought of that white hand arranging the roses in my head.
A small price to pay for this level of collagen regeneration, n’est-ce pas? Speaking of which…
And then the woman in silver came and ferried me down to the basement. In the waiting room, I drank the blood vessel water. The pomegranate seed water, I mean. It was very cold, vaguely sweet, with a bitter finish that surprised and delighted me. I stared up at the horrified white face masks on the red walls. Twisted in varying degrees of terror. As if each face had been frozen confronting its worst nightmare, really. It was lovely. The glowing woman I met last time was sitting there beneath them, reading her red magazine. The one who I thought might be mixed, like me. Ethnically ambivalent. Ambivalent, is that the word I mean? Hello again, I said. We must be on the same treatment schedule.
She looked up at me like she’d never seen me before. I’m sorry, she said, have we met? I didn’t want to confuse her, so I said, Sorry, maybe I have it wrong. I’ve been confusing names and faces lately.
And she said, Funny. I’m confusing them too. I’m told it’s a harmless psychotrope. Side effect.
I was also told that.
But worth it for the Glow. Don’t you think?
She looked in the infinity mirror and I looked there too. I stared at thousands of her. Between us, she really was the one to look at. Paler than last time. As if the color had been leached out of her skin a little. She had a whiteness. A Brightness, call it a Brightness. There was a Glow greater than before. I envied it.
I envy, I said.
And she smiled. Thank you.
* * *
Now in the Treatment Room, the black discs are on my temples, the cold white paste’s on my face. “Is this a marine algae mask?” I ask the whisper woman.
“You could call it that,” she whispers.
I’m strapped to the bed, why strapped this time?
“So you can relax. These extractions can be quite visceral,” she says. “Memory lives everywhere in the body. Down the back. In the neck and in the hands. Even the feet.”
The feet, I think, and then remember that it took a while to get down here to the Treatment Room. Because of my red shoes. Again, I had to take them off. I had to follow the woman in silver barefoot, with the red shoes gasping in my fingers. It was so silly. I really shouldn’t wear them to the house anymore. And yet if I didn’t wear them, I don’t know that I would know how to get here.
Dark in here now. I’m alone. Such a warm feeling spreading through me. So there are straps, it’s fine. Don’t fuss. Don’t struggle. The straps are meant to protect me just like the whisper woman said. From what?
Yourself, of course, says a voice inside. The roses in my mind seem to have vanished now. Nothing in my head but a dark, scented fog, the sound of chimes. Who is speaking in the fog?
I look up and see the ceiling is being retracted to reveal another ceiling of glass. A sky of water, the red jellyfish floating by, pulsing. Someone recently told me they weren’t jellyfish. Who? What someone? Some silly person. They’re obviously jellyfish. Look at those red tentacles. Look at those pulsating heads. Like translucent hearts beating in the water, aren’t they? So pretty. And again I feel my body floating up, up to the ceiling, which is weird, what about the restraints?
But your mind has no restraints, says the voice inside.
Now I’m so close-up to the ceiling glass. I’m right near the jellyfish. I see a pattern like flowers on their bodies, beautiful. The aquarium glass becomes a screen where a movie plays. Oh god. Good, I mean. It’s very good. I love movies. Which one is this?
On the glass screen, I see a little girl. She’s standing in the closet of a blue-and-white bedroom, in front of a large oval mirror. She’s dressed in her mother’s clothes, waiting at the mirror like it’s a door. She’s ugly, I think. Jellyfish swim through her little ugly duckling body. Look at her intense face. Pained. Familiar.
Huh. What film is this again? Don’t think I know this one.
Oh, but you do, says the voice. Definitely. You know this one well. Trust me.
18
I’m sitting slumped by the mirror in Mother’s closet. I’ve been waiting here awhile for Tom to show up in the glass, any minute now. I’m in the red shoes and the white dress he loves best. I’m wearing Mother’s violets-and-smoke perfume and Mother’s lipstick, the lesser red she leaves in the drawer. Although there’s nothing lesser about you, Tom always says.
Really, Tom?
Seth, remember. Remember, I’m Seth.
Okay, I say, but he really does look a lot like Tom Cruise. I know that for sure now because I’ve been watching his movies. I watched them in spite of Mother, behind her back. I asked Mother to rent them for me, I begged her. This was after Mother screamed at me about being in her room. Later, she called me into the living room and said she was sorry for screaming, she was just tired of me not listening, okay? Okay. Also mirrors were not playthings, did I understand that?
Mother was curled on the couch in one of her silk robes Father brought her from Egypt. Egypt was like a pretty robe she could put on or take off. She had a copy of Vogue magazine on her lap and a Matinée smoking in the pointy glass ashtray on the pointy glass coffee table. Everything in our apartment is shiny and pointy and cold, Stacey says. Or it’s white and hissing like the wicker. It’s what Mother calls style, I tell Stacey, who says whatever. She doesn’t like coming to our place because we can’t rate each other there. Rating is something we do only in Stacey’s basement, where I watch Stacey twirling in her bodysuit in the dark until my eyes water. Sometimes I’ll look away from her, through the cloudy basement window near the ceiling, into the endless rose garden. I can’t always see the tops of the flowers, just the spiked stems in their beds of dirt, which her Russian mother Alla’s always turning. Alla doesn’t know how much I come over because we always go through the back door, but she met me a few times when we were cutting through the garden. She was smiling, but her eyes were hard and glittery as Grand-Maman’s diamonds, and her hand, when I shook it, was a limp fish. What have we talked about traipsing through the garden, Anastasia? Alla tells Stacey, her eyes still on me. No more back door, okay? Alla’s blond like Stacey. Very Stepford, Mother says when she comes to pick me up, making a face, though I know she admires their house, the garden with its gazebo. Still, Mother prefers her own style in all things. I prefer it too. Even the cigarette in Mother’s ashtray, idly smoldering, had a pretty mouth of Mother’s best red around the filter. She smelled of violets and smoke from her jagged star.
Belle, Mother said from the couch, are you even listening to me?
Yes.
What did I say?
Mirrors aren’t playthings.
That mirror especially, understood? Look at me. She was holding my chin, tilting my head up so there was nowhere else to look except Mother’s face, shining and pointy and cold. But her eyes were soft. Wanting me to really understand about this, okay? For my own good. Comprends-tu? Mother said, speaking in French the way she did only when she was very upset. And she shook me a little.
Oui. Mom, I said, do you know Tom Cruise?
Tom Cruise? Mother said, letting go. Of course I know Tom Cruise. Who doesn’t? He’s a big movie star.
Can we watch some of his movies maybe? Can we rent them from the video store?