They rummaged through each other’s clothes until they hit skin. Anna panicked only once; she thought she heard the crackle of footfalls on the trail. “Just the trees,” Karl said, and he was right. So Anna closed her eyes and opened the valve of her thighs even wider. Karl took the invitation and pushed himself deeper in.
Then something happened. Anna felt a shift. A limbic slip. A displacement. Tremendous feeling began to move beneath her skin. It wanted out. Harder, Karl. More. Now. He did as he was told. Every thrust knocked something else loose. A worry, a fear, a conundrum, a despair, a sadness—whatever it was, each fell away, one after the other. Mary who begs for the friend I don’t want to be. Archie who can smell my sadness. Victor who I sometimes just don’t love that much. Stephen who I will love until I die. Ursula who should just shut the fuck up. Doktor Messerli to whom I’ve already told too much. Polly who but for that Wednesday would not even exist. Hans. Margrith. Edith. Otto. Roland. Alexis. My dead parents. My age. My face. My breasts. Bruno. I’ve done everything but eat a plate of glass for you. Just look at me! Love me anyway! Anna started to cry. Karl stopped and looked at her but Anna hit him with her fist, Keep going! He did. Anna tumbled through the litany once more. The harder he fucked her, the truer her thoughts became. Each statement cracked open a new catharsis. It was as honest as she’d been in years. She let them cover her. She lay down in them. I’m a queen in a goddamn mercurial bath. She remembered what the Doktor said: The being dies and takes the body with it. The cost of transcendence is death.
Anna gave over to a soundless, unexpected orgasm. Karl shuddered and grunted when he came. Anna squeezed him, then pulsed around him then let him slip from her like a soaped finger sliding through a tight ring.
Anna caught her breath getting dressed. Karl zipped himself back into his blue jeans and handed Anna her shoe. “I’ve wanted to do that for a craving time.” He meant “long.” Anna didn’t believe him but it didn’t matter. “Let’s do it again,” he said. The assent Anna gave was automatic. Okay.
ANNA NEVER TOLD STEPHEN about Polly Jean. In fact, she’d never contacted him at all.
BY A QUARTER AFTER seven the Benzes were homeward bound. The boys, Polly, and Ursula fell asleep after the transfer in Frick. It would be past nine by the time the Benzes got home. On the train Anna watched a Swiss Army cadet talk on his cell phone. She passed her time imagining the party on the other end. Is it his mother? His father? His girlfriend? Is today his sister’s birthday, too? Anna held her sleeping daughter. Victor rested his head on Anna’s shoulder. An affection surged in Anna for her eldest child when, lowering her nose to his head, she noted that he smelled like David’s dog. Charles was asleep as well. He’d had a difficult afternoon. While Anna was on her walk he’d fallen off the branch of the tree he’d been climbing. He’d cut his palm. He was howling in the bathroom fighting Bruno as he tried to wash the wound when Anna returned. Anna took over. “You have to let me clean this, Schatz,” she cooed. He shook his head. “I know it hurts. So close your eyes. We’ll do this quickly, okay?” Charles sniffed and held out his hand and closed his eyes. Anna rinsed and dried the cut, then put a little ointment on it and dressed it with gauze and tape, all in less than a minute. When Anna asked Charles how it happened that he fell he said he couldn’t remember. Anna mustered her sternest face and reprimanded him for not paying better attention. Then, she gave him a giant hug.
Anna looked across the row to Bruno, who wore a blank, drunken expression. Despite the day’s cloud cover, he was sunburned.
“How,” Bruno asked sleepily when they were almost halfway home and for the first time since Anna had begun them, “are your appointments with the psychiatrist? What do you talk about?”
He wants to know whether we talk about him, Anna thought. “We talk about ways I can steer myself into a trajectory that forces me to participate more fully with the world,” Anna said, quoting Doktor Messerli.
This seemed to satisfy him. He yawned and pointed to her leg. “Your tights are ripped.” Anna looked down. There was a hole the size of a ten-rappen coin on her right shin and a run laddering after it. She must have snagged it on her toenail, dressing.
“I didn’t notice,” Anna said. This was not a lie.
ANNA SPENT THE PREGNANCY reconciling herself to herself. This would be his parting song, she thought. The adieu he didn’t bid. It would be, she argued, the only part of him worth keeping. Despondency nauseated her. Morning sickness made her cry. She’d been weepy with the other pregnancies and her daily tears were no surprise to anyone.
ANNA TOLD DOKTOR MESSERLI a dream of a fire-ravaged cabin in an unknown wood and asked her what she thought it meant.
Vhat dooo yooooo sink, Anna?