‘I was giving people a good show. I am,’ says Klara. ‘I’m trying to be a good mother. I want to be a success. But you don’t know what it’s like in my head. You don’t know what I’ve lost.’
‘I don’t know what you’ve lost? Do you know – do you have any idea – what happened in my country?’ Raj wipes his eyes with the heel of his free hand. ‘Your dad had a business, a family. You still have a mom and a sister and a doctor big brother. My dad picked trash; my mom died so young I can’t remember her. Amit died in ’85 on a plane, minutes from Bombay, the first time he tried to go home. Your family had it good. They have it good.’
‘I know how difficult your life has been,’ Klara whispers. ‘I never meant to minimize that. But my brother died. My father died. They didn’t have it good.’
‘Why? ’Cause they didn’t live till ninety? Think about what they had while they were here. People like me, on the other hand – we hang on by our teeth, and if we’re really, really lucky, if we’re fucking exceptional, we get somewhere. But you can always be airlifted out.’ Raj shakes his head. ‘Jesus, Klara. Why do you think I don’t talk to you about my problems, real problems? It’s ’cause you can’t take it. You don’t have space in your head for anyone’s problems but yours.’
‘That’s an awful thing to say.’
‘But is it true?’
Klara can’t speak; her brain is tangled, wires crossed, the monitor shutting down. Raj checks Ruby’s diaper and reties the laces on her tiny shoes. He takes the diaper bag from Klara’s shoulder and walks to the bathroom door.
‘I swear to God, Klara, I thought you were getting better. Soon as the health insurance comes through, soon as we get a day off, I’m taking you to see somebody. You can’t lose it now,’ he says. ‘We’re too close.’
December 28th, 1990. If the woman is right, Klara has four days to live. If the woman is right, she’ll die on opening night.
There must be a loophole, a secret trapdoor. She’s a magician, goddammit. All she has to do is find the fucking trapdoor.
She takes a red ball to bed and plays with it under the covers. She’s figured out how to turn it into a strawberry. A French drop from the right hand to the left makes the ball disappear. Then she moves her left hand over her right. When she does a shuttle pass and opens her left fist again, there’s the cool, fragrant fruit. She eats each strawberry and tucks their green stems under the mattress. Then she slips out of the RV.
It’s black, black night, but it must be over ninety degrees. She can hear people moving around in their campers: showering and cooking, eating and arguing, yelps from the teenage couple in the Gulf Stream who are constantly having sex. Everywhere, there’s life: rattling in tin cans, trying to get out.
She walks to the pool. It’s shaped like a kidney bean and glows an acid, unearthly blue. There are no pool chairs – the manager claims they only get stolen – so Klara stands at the deep end. She takes off her tank and shorts, letting them fall in a clump. Her stomach is still soft and creped from Ruby. When she removes her underwear, her pubic hair seems to bloom.
She jumps.
The water surrounds her like a membrane. Klara’s feet look nearer than they are, and her arms seem to bend. The pool appears shallower than eight feet, though she knows this is an illusion. Refraction, it’s called: light bends when it enters a new medium. But the human brain is programmed to assume that light travels in straight lines. What she sees is different than what’s there.
She’s heard the same thing about stars: they appear to twinkle when light, viewed through earth’s atmosphere, becomes bent. The human eye processes the movement as absence. But the light is always there.
Klara breaks through the water. She gasps.
Perhaps the point is not to resist death. Perhaps the point is that there’s no such thing. If Simon and Saul are contacting Klara, then consciousness survives the death of the body. If consciousness survives the death of the body, then everything she’s been told about death isn’t true. And if everything she’s been told about death isn’t true, maybe death is not death at all.
She turns onto her back and floats. If the woman is right, if she could see Simon’s death in 1969, then there’s magic in the world: some strange, shimmering knowledge in the very heart of the unknowable. It doesn’t matter whether or when Klara dies; she can communicate with Ruby just as she does with Simon now. She can cross boundaries, like she always wanted to.
She can be the bridge.
19.
The billboard outside the hotel has changed. Tonight, it reads. The Immortalist, with Raj Chapal. The show won’t begin until eleven o’clock – a New Year’s Eve special – but the entrance is already overflowing with tourists. Raj parks the Sunbird in the employee lot. Usually, she carries their bags and he carries Ruby, but tonight Klara won’t let go of the baby. She’s put Ruby in a red party dress that Gertie sent for Ruby’s first birthday, with thick white tights and black patent leather shoes.
They walk through the lobby. Fish glow and scuttle in the fifty-foot aquarium. The tiger habitat is swarmed, though the animals are sleeping, their downy chins flat on the concrete. Raj and Klara turn toward the elevators. This is where they’ll part: Raj will bring their bags to the theater, and Klara will bring Ruby to day care.
Raj turns to her and puts his hand on her cheek. His palm is warm, calloused from work in the shop. ‘You ready?’
Klara’s heartbeat trips. She looks at his face. It’s beautiful: the swan’s neck of each cheekbone, the angular chin. His shoulder-length hair is in a ponytail, as usual; the makeup artist will blow it out and add silicone to make it shine.
‘I want you to know that I’m proud of you,’ he says.
His eyes are glossy. Klara inhales in surprise.
‘I know I’ve been hard on you. I know things have been tense. But I love you; I love us. And I have faith in you.’
‘But you don’t believe in my tricks. You don’t believe in the magic.’
She smiles. She feels sorry for him, for how much he doesn’t know.
‘No,’ he says, frustrated, like he’s talking to Ruby. ‘There’s no such thing.’
Families surge toward the elevators, moving around Klara and Raj, through them, and Raj drops his hand. When they’re alone again, Raj puts it back where it was, but it’s harder, now, his palm cupping her jaw.
‘Listen. Just because I don’t believe in your tricks doesn’t mean I don’t believe in you. I think you’re great at what you do. I think you have the power to affect people. You’re an artist, Klara. An entertainer.’
‘I’m not a show pony. I’m not a clown.’
‘No,’ says Raj. ‘You’re a star.’
He drops his bags and reaches for her. With his arms around her back, he pulls her close and squeezes. Pressed to Klara’s breast, Ruby squeaks. Their family of three. Already they feel like ghosts, like people she used to know. She thinks of the days – they feel so long ago – when she thought Raj could give her everything she wanted.