I asked him for water. He nodded, got up, and walked about 30 paces away to a small cabin. It was like the one they had locked me in.
My heart was beating quickly, as if I had just run up and down steps for 20 minutes. There was a figure in the distance. At first, I thought he was dark because he was standing among the trees and I was wearing dark glasses. But it looked cut from ink. And the sun was shining. I could see it coming closer, between the branches, a sludge among the green and lush. Darkness spilled and pooled over roots, looped between trees, closer. I held my breath. It continued slithering. I could feel a sort of ache coming from it: a longing to be near me. I touched the grass, tried to focus on it to calm myself. Don’t look. But I couldn’t feel the soft blades. There was no heat from the sun on the ground. There should have been smells too: grass, soil, woods in the distance, my deodorant fighting against the heat. Nothing.
Right before my grandma died, she told me knowing about her cancer felt like a bird that was constantly on her shoulder. It refused to go away. Sometimes it chattered at her. Its feathers were always brushing her cheek, its sharp claws digging into her flesh. She was never alone ever again because it was always with her.
I had thought that was terrible. I couldn’t imagine how it felt to always know you were dying. There were times where I wanted to ask her: Did you wake up each morning and have to tell yourself, this could be it? How did you stop being afraid? How did your brain cope with the stress of thinking each day could be the last day? Are you scared to go to sleep? It would have been selfish and immature to ask her those questions. I held her hand, told her I loved her every time it came up.
I was going to die when it reached me. It was the most certain I’d ever been in my entire life. This is some unfair bullshit, I thought, with my eyes shut. I knew in a few seconds the shape would unfurl, cover me, drown me. Something poked my arm.
I screamed.
A thump as the water bottle dropped. I opened my eyes. Smith stared at me, tense and afraid. It’s just me, he said. I looked behind him toward the woods. The darkness was gone. I pushed the sunglasses up, rubbed my eyes. Little red flecks floated in the corner of them, but the world pushed mostly back to normal. Why did you yell, he asked.
I said it was black like tar. A shape that wanted me dead. My voice was flat. The sky was beginning its distortions again.
Tanya, the only time I had felt close to this was when we had gotten high at that co-op party. We had walked home together. I was scared and holding the back of the frilly blouse you’d worn to the party. Did someone slip you something, you kept asking. But I was monumentally stoned, and we came upon a tree and it was covered in so many crows. In the night, it was a monster with many heads. Its 50 mouths were screaming at me. But what scared me was the world was completely different than I had ever known before. I tried to explain it to you, and you said in a very sweet voice, You’ll be home soon and I’ll make some popcorn. Think of how cozy you’ll feel.
You’re too stimulated, Smith said. If I had been less scared, I would have said That’s not how people talk to adults. It’s how they talk to dogs and children. He took my hand. Led me to the cabin. Because I couldn’t feel his fingers, it was more like a force—gravity—was pulling me there. I couldn’t fight it.
The cabin’s wood was mesmerizing. I could see it coming back to life, becoming a new kind of tree. It interlocked, with clear leaves growing off every space. Inside the cabin was a trapdoor. My heart is going to fucking explode, I said.
Smith went first and helped me down into a stairwell. He was sweating. He told me to touch the sides to get steady, to tell him if I was light-headed. We walked down a flight of stairs carved into the earth. It smelled like peanut butter and rain. He pulled me forward, though I wanted to touch the walls, the stairs. The darkness soothed me a little, made everything move closer to ordinariness. A millipede scuttled on the wall, growing longer and longer the more I watched it.
We came to a door, heavy and new. Smith had to key in a code. When the door swung open, we were back in the facility. I realized I was still wearing the sunglasses. I tried to take them off, but he said it was still bright. Keep them on.
I meant to ask him, What did you do to me? But it came out as Why would you do this to someone? My mouth said it multiple times. I didn’t mean the drug, I meant the experiments. But Smith took it to mean the drug and said he knew it wasn’t ready. Why do you do this job, I asked him. We walked past the room where everyone had watched the video, and Smith led me to a room that was set up for medical work. There was a man sitting in a chair alone, his mouth open. A blue goop was oozing out the sides of his lips. Below his nose was tinged with it too. His expression wasn’t concerned or upset, it was closer to a Jesus-Christ-I-can’t-believe-I-have-to-wait annoyance.
Smith drew curtains around the area, so I couldn’t see the man any longer. Then he helped me onto a medical table. The paper clung to the backs of my legs. Sweat ran down my forehead. Smith pulled out his cell phone and started texting.
Five women appeared, all wearing lab coats. One took notes while one removed my sunglasses and looked in my eyes. Another one checked my reflexes while her colleague listened to my heart. The woman looking at my eyes muttered something about it being a little soon to make me do something like this. Then she looked at Smith and I couldn’t tell if she was looking to see if he agreed or if she was afraid of his reaction.
The women left, and Smith and I were alone.
He grabbed my shoulders, pressed the top of my head into his chin. I could feel and count every hair that made up his stubble. He smelled like coffee and cigarettes and mints. The ceiling lights shimmered in my peripheral vision.
That sounds almost romantic, but it wasn’t. Objectively, Smith is not an unattractive person. And I did feel the small attraction that can come from spending a lot of time around a person who is paying attention to you, but there wasn’t a hint of sex in what he was doing. He was listening for my breath, feeling the warmth of my skin, but it wasn’t about connection or an upswelling of feelings. He was reminding himself, This is a person. Lena is a person. It became more and more disturbing. He had to feel my hair, my skin, to actively remind himself I was someone. Still, he was touching me, and I didn’t want him to. It was another chipping away of my boundaries.
I told him I was going to barf. My voice sounded 9 again—high, almost squeaky. I opened my eyes. My grandmother stood behind him. Not as she was when I knew her, but as she was in the photograph. She told me my life was cracking open. Sticking out of her left arm were—I don’t know the precise medical name for them—needles used to inject vaccines.
Hello, I said to her. Tell me. I’m not sure if I said this aloud or thought it. Tell me that I’ll have my life back.
She took my hand but didn’t smile. Tell me, I thought I said to her, to go home. My grandmother took a needle from her arm and put it in my own. It’s just a pinch, baby. Look at me. Together we can get through anything.
I reached for her hand, but there was only air.
28
And then, Tanya, I woke up and I was at Long Lake. Across, on the other side, was the meadow with my grandmother’s tree. But I was near the docks, where people could launch canoes and have picnics. I watched as the observers threw metal containers into the water. It smelled like a mixture of cotton-candy perfume and cleaning supplies burning on a stove. The air hurt my nostrils, my lungs. I put my hands over my mouth and nose, but my fingers stunk of it. The containers sank into the water and I had a coughing fit. I bent over from the force of it. There was an empty pop bottle near my feet, and I picked it up when I was done. I threw it in the recycling bin and coughed again.