The black coat billows around me like the wings of the angel of death that used to sit on the roof of our hospital waiting for the souls streaming out of our windows, and now I am streaming down, down toward the rushing, roiling water. Dear god, what have I done? I have killed her.
I am sobbing and gasping against the wind, pain like a bomb through my chest, and the water is rushing up closer and closer and I will hit soon and then I smash through liquid like hitting a brick wall and it is in my nose and mouth and I am screaming and struggling and fighting and flailing and then suddenly silence explodes in my ears, all around me. The waterweed that has existed in my body sucks me down, pulls at every limb in slow motion. I am suspended, all is silence. I open my eyes and see the yellow blanket undulating so close to my grasping hands. And if it is here, then where is she? I turn my head and see my baby girl. She is just inches away from me, her eyes open and staring, their chocolate brown transmuted into deep green in this place, her fair hair streaming, so much longer now, the curls unwound, reach out as if they would twine about me, pull me to her like golden spider webs, but they don’t reach, they only kiss the sides of my face. I stretch my hands out to catch her, but she is just out of reach. She undulates like shimmering ink spilled into water, a gorgeous slow ballet of limbs and movement. She is dancing away from me. There are other forces that want her. They suck her away slowly until she is only a tiny thing so very far away. Then she is gone. I struggle and thrash to follow, but they do not want me.
I am alone.
All around is a viscous, uncanny silence. The hum I have heard all my life, that awful echo is gone. It is all gone: light, sound, pain, time, familiarity. I lie on a bed made of darkness. I have fallen into some other realm, unknown, unseen, and felt only in dream. I float as if I am in amniotic fluid. The void opens around me. I have leapt from the planet. Now there are only fires in the distance, stars burning, silent galaxies slowly, serenely twisting and forming. I am in the grasp of the sacred. I am beyond the reach of my species.
Sunlight drops through the darkness, illuminates thin columns of water like blades come to touch my skin. It gathers about me. The sun god is calling, is claiming, is pulling me up and out of the silence. I don’t want this. I need to stay in the abyss. Instead, the water around me too is churning me upward. I am sucked toward light, and above me there is movement, chaos, noise, and then like a cork popping, I break into air and am surrounded by smashing waves and the implosion of my internals, excruciating, panting terror. I am thrown like a toy through the breaks and then a boat comes and men jump into the water, reach for me, haul me onboard. I am shattered, and one of them leaning over me in his huge white suit, looking down at me with tears in his eyes as he cuts away my clothes, asks, “Why?” and darkness wraps midnight around my head.
Part Five
Epilogue
Twenty-four
I had wanted to die. I had jumped and the water was supposed to take me. But for its own and secret reasons the water did not want me, and so I lived on.
I wake up in a hospital bed, a guard at the door, people coming and going, needles thrust into my arm. The nurse is not gentle. I keep trying to tell her that she is hurting me, but then I realize that she is doing it on purpose. She wants to hurt me. My brain muddled on sedatives swims up to the surface. Why would she do that? What have I done to warrant this? And this question “What have I done?” leads to a room of such horror that I can’t open the door. It is so much easier to sleep. To lie in this slim bed between these cool, clean sheets and sleep.
*
Through the drugs there is something gnawing at me. My mind is like a vulture circling; it spots the red ragged thing in the center, but is not able to swoop down and grasp the relevant facts.
In the midst of these days, his face. My love. My lost beloved. He screams and fights. His ravaged frame barely recognizable—the caverns beneath his eyes, the flesh worn, all that solid flesh, all that gleaming muscle has melted away in anguish. This is a wraith of the man I knew.
They have to hold him away from me. “Why! Why? Why’d you do this?” he shouts and sobs. Tears running down his face, he howls, “How could you?” His fists hurl out, itching to make satisfying thuds against my skin. The cops pull him away. They will not give him the pleasure. But they wish for it themselves, to smash my soft face, to let loose a cascade of my teeth, to break my bones. Their job is to pull him away, so they do it, all the while patting him on the back, saying, “It’s okay, man. It’s okay.”
But none of this matters now. The worst thing has already happened.