The feeling goes beyond her mind and tracks through her whole nervous system. Hannah sees a dark-wooded courtroom full of men with powdered faces and white wigs. They hear arguments that a young woman has blighted crops and spread disease and committed lewd acts. She is stripped and a birthmark along her thigh declared the mark of the devil, and she is named a witch and sentenced to death, and she resists the guards, and they knock her over the head and carry her dumbstruck to the holy river where she will be drowned and purified surrounded by a cheering rabble. She is tied to a kind of seesaw that plunges her below the surface, and she holds her breath and slices through her trusses with a blade she kept hidden in her mouth, and she swims downstream to escape, and when minutes later the seesaw rises from the river dripping and empty of its victim, the rabble goes silent with terror.
Hannah sees a long line of men, bearded and filthy and jeweled with sores and rib-slatted from starvation, stripping off their clothes and folding them into piles and proceeding into the showers at Dachau. The guard tells them to hurry—Beeile dich!—and then clangs the door closed behind them. He grins through the small glass window, which splatters red with his blood a second later. The lock turns and the door swings open, and the woman steps through holding a pistol. She uses the same words as the guard—Beeile dich, Na los—but with a different sort of smile on her face. Now is their chance, she tells them. The guards are dead and the fence is down, and they must run and they do, and the sky above the camp is gray-ceilinged from the smoke that rises from the furnaces that would have been fed their bodies.
Hannah sees mountains. The moon hangs overhead, silvering the patches of snow and the surrounding peaks. A long line of luxury cars is parked along a winding, pine-bordered road that leads to a chateau. The windows shimmer with the uncertain lights of candles. Inside, some people wander around in robes, all of them wearing masks. Bird masks and goat masks and wolf masks and devil masks with twisted horns rising out of them. Someone slits the neck of a lamb and with its blood paints a giant cipher on the marble floor. Everyone gathers around it and begins to chant so that their voices become one voice heard even through the windows. Outside, the woman glugs and spritzes gasoline. Then she steps back and sparks a match and tosses it, and the flame catches midair. Just like that, the chateau is surrounded by a roiling blue skirt that brightens orange as the flames take to the wood. Glass shatters. Metal warps. At first the people remain inside, shrinking away from the fire, and then they scramble out the front door, out the windows, and when they do, they die. Gunfire sounds all around the house as the woman circles it. Bodies drop, one after the other, a pile of them by the front door. Some make it out of the house, but their robes catch fire and make them easy to find in the dark. Her breath smokes and the gun smokes and the house smokes. She waits until the roof collapses, until the glowing frame is visible, and even then a torch-lit body comes screeching from inside, and the woman fells it with a single shot to the head.
The woman—Sarin, that is her name—has lived many lives. She dies and then she comes back, dies and then comes back, always fighting for the light, like a sun wresting away the night morning after morning.
The images continue to unscroll, and Hannah feels visually gorged, as she sometimes does with the Mirage, unable to close her eyes, to stop the influx. Her mother always says she is growing up too fast, but now she is growing in too fast, her mind filling with memories and understanding that are not her own.
And then Sarin sucks in one last bit of breath before falling back. Coughing and gagging. Her skin is now gray and deeply creased, the wrinkles on her face multiplying by the second so that she seems in danger of crumbling to pieces.
The man tries to help Sarin, but she swings an arm, motions him away. She gags then. Vomits a black splattering mess. She has consumed and expelled the hitchhiker inside of Hannah. The puddle of it writhes with movement. Flies and moths and beetles and other unrecognizables with long legs and longer stingers crawl from the bile and test their wings and buzz away.
?
Hannah has never been so hungry. A plate of pancakes sits before her. She uses a knife to smear a hunk of butter across them. Then pours syrup until only the plate’s outer rim remains white. The smell is more than a smell. It’s a feeling, the sweet steam rising off them.
She stabs her way through three cakes, saws off a triangle, brings it to her mouth. The cakes are so dank with syrup, they dissolve in her mouth. She relishes the sweet burst of maple mellowed by the wheaty wholesomeness—and then pulls back the fork, the tines sliding between her lips.
It isn’t long before the plate is empty. She asks for more. More pancakes. Then four eggs, over hard, crisped brown around the edges. A little salsa on the side. Five sausages, one that she shares with Hemingway. Toast smeared with butter and grape jelly. A banana. A small cup of yogurt sprinkled with granola and frozen blueberries. Two tall glasses of whole milk and a short glass of orange juice.
She eats quickly and without interruption. There is no noise except a happy grunt, a thirsty gulp, and the occasional knife-shriek across her plate. When she finishes, she leans back and rubs her bloated stomach. The fullness applies to her mind as well, confusedly jammed with information she has not yet processed.
Only then does she take in the three adults and one floppy-eared German shepherd watching her. Her mother stands with her hands pooched deep in her cardigan pockets. The man—Juniper, that’s his name—has his arms crossed and his legs spread shoulder-width. And her aunt Lela sits at the other end of the table, stooped over with her hands tented together. “How do you feel?” she says.
Never better. Cleansed. Enriched. Maybe she should feel crazy—given what has happened to her—the kind of crazy that makes you crawl into the corner of a padded room and bash your temple with your palm and hum nonsense songs. Maybe that feeling is there, but it’s buried deep, like a pain scrubbed away by a numbing shot that calms and warms her into a state of narcosis.
“Should I make more?” Juniper says. “Or are you done?”
“I’m done now. I’m good.”
Juniper stands and lumbers toward her and pulls out the nearest chair. He studies her curiously for a moment, then puts out a hand. It’s three times the size of hers, cracked and callused. The skin of his forearm sleeved in bandages. Hannah looks to her mother, who nods, and then she allows him to take her hand. His grip closes around hers. “That was close. You got here just in time.”
“Where’s the woman who helped me? Sarin?”
“She had to go. Removing that hitchhiker took a lot out of her.”
“It made her sick instead of me?”
“Yes.” He appears uncertain how to respond. “But she’ll be fine, I hope. She’ll be back. She wants to talk to you more.”
“Why?”
“Because she thinks you’re special.”
“Is that what she meant? When she said, you’re like me?”
He nods.
“Is she your mom?”
“No.”
“Your sister? Wife?”
“Not my sister and not my wife, no.”
“I guess she seemed too old to be any of those things.”
His laugh sounds like a bark. “She wouldn’t love to hear that, but yes, you’re right. She’s very, very old. Not her body so much as what’s in it.” He pats her hand, rubs the knuckle ridge. “Mother, sister, wife. She’s none of those things, but in a way I suppose she’s become all of those things. I don’t know what the right word is. Friend, colleague?”