Girl Minus X

by Anne Stone

  Finally, as if a vanishing point has swallowed the man whole, there comes a beautiful, unbroken silence.

  She counts, waiting.

  Dany squeezes out of her foul hiding spot.

  In the fresh air, standing in rotten vegetable leavings, she brushes at her clothes desperately, trying to wipe off the disgusting stench. Her mouth is full of water and she spits it clean. Then, taking a deep breath, she takes off her boots, quietly steals up the alley in socked feet, eyes sweeping the ground for syringes.

  The alley, like the cul-de-sac, is clear. Still, she isn’t scot free, not yet. If she is unlucky, the guard will double back. Or a ghost car will come silently creeping – the hybrids are impossible to hear. Or worse yet, the school cop will call in canines.

  Dogs are bad. You can’t outrun dogs.

  She’s known five or six kids at Darling-­Holmes, ones who’ve run in the night – as she had, in her turn – and who were returned to the bunk come morning with wounds in the shape of a dog’s teeth up and down an arm. Of course, not one of those kids can hold a candle to Dany.

  Sure, the dogs have left their marks on her. But it isn’t like anyone can tell. Because her arms are a ruin. The skin looks like it has been liquefied in places. Her arms don’t hurt her much, not anymore – they were once twin beds of fire – but still, each night and each morning, she rubs lotion into her arms, or the skin cracks and lesions open up along the worst of the seam lines.

  Not even a dog can make Dany’s arms look much worse than they do now.

  Dany pushes up her long sleeves – she is too hot to care who sees her scars. Still in her socks, she starts down the alley at a slow jog. She carries her boots in her hands, moving silently. A block up, she passes a homeless man. Is he infected? She can’t say. No one can. What she does know is this – if he has the virus, it is only the regular strain, version 1.0. He doesn’t look anything like Jasper or Liz.

  But something about him tells her he is probably infected.

  Maybe it’s the water.

  The man has a huge plastic sack made from some kind of tarpaulin. The bag is stuffed with cans and bottles – taken from dumpsters probably. But beside it, she can see a half-dozen dirty plastic bottles, ones he’s refilled with water. By the time they’re taken to the hospice, the virus has made them drink water compulsively. The shrunken hypothalamus again. At the hospice, she’s seen evidence of what all that water does to the dying. The ascites, the swollen belly-bags, that develop with time.

  One of the man’s feet, the bare one, is encrusted with blood. The other foot is clad in a rotting tennis shoe. He is wearing a worn pair of track pants, but no shirt. Even in April his skin looks like tanned leather. His patchy beard shows a couple of months’ growth. He looks a question at the boots she cradles, or maybe he looks at her arms, but he doesn’t so much as glance at her face.

  Dany breathes through her mouth.

  She can smell him, even from ten feet away. Even through her own reek.

  If he is infected, the virus will colonize his brain. And day by day, one flickering light bulb at a time, everything that makes him who he is will burn out. Until the day comes that someone glances at him in passing and decides to call him in. They’ll put a yellow jacket on him. Lock that jacket up tight. Dany reaches for her hex key.

  Still there, inside of her shirt.

  She breathes her relief. And there, at the edge of consciousness, she just makes it out, the rattling of rickety old wheels disappearing into the distance. Then Dany sees it. A small figure. A little girl, leaning against the wall, a single arm outstretched. Only, no, it’s the same strange doll she saw the day before – the one that was propped up beside the dumpster. Yesterday, it looked to be greeting her. Today, the tangle-haired doll is standing by a wall, one arm outstretched, pointing Dany’s way home.

  Dany looks from the doll to the homeless man, the one with the virus, but she knows the doll doesn’t belong to him. No, the doll is the creature of that woman, the one with the familiar face. The one who is always rattling her cart through the back alley by Dany’s place. Always watching. Always with eyes on Dany and her sister. The sound of her rattling cart dogging them, as the two make their way to and from school.

  Dany looks around for the woman – but she is nowhere in sight. Still, in the distance, she once more hears the rattle of her shopping cart.

  Dany turns her back on the doll and heads for home.

  She isn’t far now, and as she jogs, her eyes scan the street, moving from side to side, left to right, checking the peripheries. But she doesn’t cross the guard’s path, doesn’t see any cops, doesn’t hear the low growl and near-silent padding of a canine’s paws.

  Dany takes in the place she lives with a stranger’s eyes. First, she does a check of the shadowy spots, the corners, the bushes, and finally, she scans the approach down the alley.

  Clear.

  Over the years, she’s lived in a couple different units. She lived in a basement flat with her mother – the one whose sole tiny window looked out on a small hole in the lawn, ringed by aluminum siding, about half as deep as a grave.

  The window well.

  Later, she and her aunt moved into number six, where she lives now. So, she’s put in a lot of years at this building. Minus those eleven months gone – the ones she spent locked up at the work farm.

  Honestly, the place doesn’t look like home.

  The building is a big ugly box. One look, and you know the place was never nice, not even when it was new. In the yard, there is an old cedar-railing sandbox. Each spring, the rails sink a little further into the ground. No one bothers to plant flowers in the garden, not anymore.

  Dany glances at the old heritage house next door. That’s where Mac will go.

  Bea’s place is more than a hundred years old, and, like the cedar railing of the sandbox, slowly sliding into the earth. There is no sign of the old woman. Still, her screen door is open a few inches, and the curtains are catching the breeze, fluttering through the open crack.

  Dany nods. If that door is open, then Bea is home.

  Dany squats down and takes the time to get back into her boots. Otherwise, all that broken glass in the stairwell, what her aunt calls Eastside rain, will cut her up. While she ties her boots, she keeps an eye on the alley.

  In the upstairs hall, Dany stops outside of her door and, using a dime, unscrews the number on her door. A moment later, she is standing outside of Kuzmenko’s unit. He lives in number five, right across from Dany. She undoes the screw on his door, and replaces his number with her own.

  She lays her hand on Kuzmenko’s door and a shadow crosses the peephole. “It’s just for a bit,” she tells him in English, adding, “Bal’shoye spaseeba, Kuzmenko.”

  Dany nods at the peephole.

  Outside of her own door, a moment later, she puts his number up. Smiles. She’s just given herself a brand new, untraceable address.

  The rent-a-cop can show up here if he wants, the ministry, too, for that matter – but all they’ll find is an old Russian émigré who is too old and sick to remember more than a few words of spoken English – and no trace of Dany.

  Dany grins.

  Let them piss off Kuzmenko. See what that gets them.

  Then she pulls out her keys and lets herself in. Dany is safe at last. Home free. Olly olly oxen free.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 15

  Inside the small apartment, Dany sniffs at her shirt – all but vomits in her mouth – and strips the thing off, burying it in the garbage.

  After taking a shower, Dany stares at the foggy mirror. After a long moment, and a steeling breath, she swipes at the mirror with a hand towel. First, she wipes away a narrow stripe at the top, revealing the face of a dark-haired girl.

  “I’d say you’re at a crossroads,” she tells the girl in the mirror, her voice reasonable. “Y
ou can kill yourself now. But, I don’t know, maybe we just play this one through, see if we get lucky?”

  The girl in the mirror is without an opinion.

  Dany steels herself again. This time, the swipe of her towel reveals the rest of her. But Dany loses the dark-haired girl, because her gaze is pulled inexorably to those arms.

  The sight, she’s never gotten used to it.

  The girl’s flesh is a cruel patchwork. But it’s the texture that pulls Dany’s gaze. The way the skin is raised in places, and there are strange little declivities, like moon craters, as if bits of the muscle have been torn away. The padding that should be around her muscles has been removed, revealing all too clearly what should hide beneath the flesh. Her eyes take in the strangely mottled colour of her skin, the lines that mark the rough grafts. The new lesions, the bloody crust. Her arms look like they’ve been submerged in acid, then jerry-rigged with a few spare strips of mismatched flesh. As if the doctors didn’t have time to do more than a quick quilt-work job of her. To her, the arms are, in a way, fascinating. But she knows what it must be like for other people.

  After it first happened, she figured the scars had rendered her moot. Unlovable. That she’d have friends, she’d have family, but she wouldn’t have the kind of relationship that would mean she’d have to take off her long-sleeved shirt. She believed that the fire had set her … apart.

  She feels differently now.

  Looking at her arms now, she tells herself a new story. I lived through the fire. I lived through it. And if a person can’t look at my arms and see how that’s life? How that’s me? Well then, they aren’t worth the breath it takes to say, Screw you.

  Dany pulls on a fresh long-sleeved shirt – and looks at herself again in the mirror. The effect is entirely different. But the girl in the shirt, the one without visible scars, is just an illusion. Not the real girl. Not the survivor. The real Dany, scars and all, that’s who she is. Screw anyone who doesn’t get it.

  Dany sniffs at her shirt, as fresh as lemons. Like the dishwashing detergent she washed it with. She looks at the mirror – and the girl blinks back at her.

  Dany shrugs.

  “See ya,” she tells the girl in the glass.

  “Not if I see you first,” the girl says.

  And then the lights flicker, twice, and darkness steals the girl’s image from the glass.

  Dany went on a date with a boy. Once.

  Ruben Ripley.

  They went to the beach together, last summer. The hot sand was good between her toes, and she took off her shorts – her bathing suit was underneath – and headed to the water.

  “Your shirt,” he said.

  Dany stared at him a beat, then got it over with. She took the shirt off and tossed it on the sand.

  Ruben didn’t say anything, not right away. But the look on his face, right before he turned away from her, was enough.

  They were waist-deep in it when he finally looked at her again.

  “Your arms,” he said, “they look like they hurt.”

  Dany, squatting down, submerged under the waves.

  Half an hour later, when she came out, she pulled on her long-sleeved shirt.

  “You’re leaving,” he said.

  Dany nodded and put the buds in her ears and the music washed him away, the way, half an hour before, an entire ocean had flooded up around her and disappeared him.

  When the bus pulled up, Ruben got on first. He picked out a pair of seats near the front. Ruben sat down in one, and his duffle bag sat on the other.

  And Dany walked past him like the stranger that he was.

  At the back, she sat and stared out the window. The rocking motion of the bus and the warm salt air put her to sleep. When she woke up, she was at the end of the line and Ruben, like a bad dream, was gone. It’d taken her a long time to get past the shame and to figure it out. No, it hadn’t been Dany who failed the test. Ruben Ripley failed the test. Her arms are a litmus test of a person’s humanity.

  Eva helped her see that.

  But some days, it’s hard to be a person.

  But Eva makes that easier, too.

  Eva sees her scars as part of her. The first time Eva saw Dany – really saw her – Eva looked into Dany’s eyes and simply said, “Your scars are part of you. You’re beautiful.” A shiver runs through Dany. But she can’t think about any of that, because she can’t be selfish. Because Dany has to think of Mac.

  When the phone rings, Dany is scribbling some math on the wall beside the window. Here, with the window open, the stench of the dumpster below is overpowering. But she has a perfect view of Bea’s backyard. Only there is no sign of Eva. No sign of her sister.

  And now the dead telephone is ringing.

  Dany turns her back on the equation and slowly follows the sound into the living room. For a minute, she just stands there, staring at the little black box, the one they cut off days ago. Somehow, the phone is back from the dead. And it is ringing. Loudly.

  For a moment, her hand hovers over the black horn, but no, no good could come of that phone, she knows. No good at all. She pulls the cord from the wall and retreats to her bedroom. But in those few minutes, the feeling has gotten worse.

  Eva and her sister should be at Bea’s by now.

  She glances again at her math equation, the one that she is writing on the white wall with a Sharpie, the one that just won’t come out right.

  But this time, when her eyes fall on the math, understanding fills her mind.

  It’s not like every person has an equal chance of meeting with every other person, like we’re atoms in Brownian motion, or a bowl of alphabet soup. Jasper taught her this, told her all about stochastic modelling. She should have remembered. Stupid.

  Dany starts again.

  No, people aren’t soup, are they?

  Not all people mix the same way. Plus, there has to be a delay, for the window of infection. So add a new class, here.

  Dany scribbles another notation on the wall.

  Now, when she retraces the resulting graph, finally, the picture looks right. The rates of infection oscillate and rise. Graph overlays graph, curve overlays curve, until a butterfly fills her wall, its wings not gossamer but a series of curving black lines.

  Lorenz’s butterfly.

  The strange attractor. An accident of successive drafts, maybe? Something more? A pattern in the noise.

  Dany stares at those lines for so long, so hard, they imprint on her eyes, and when she turns away an outline of the butterfly lifts from her wall and flutters out over the world. When the noise erupts – fists banging at Kuzmenko’s door, gruff voices demanding Dany come out – she’s got no other choice left. She slips on a mask and follows the butterfly.

  She opens her bedroom window wide, sits on its edge and, lowering herself from the frame, hangs there a moment, suspended in air. And when she opens her hands to let go, falling the last six feet to the dumpster’s lid, the butterfly is already there.

  | Chapter 0 = X + 16

  Lorenz’s butterfly vanishes somewhere in the alley out back from Bea’s place. Dany stands in the shade of a pear tree. Two long depressions, left by tire tracks, mark the alley. On either side of those tire tracks, clutches of crabgrass feed on shadow.

  Dany looks everywhere, but the butterfly is gone.

  She closes her eyes – feels for the strange attractor, the one that lifted from her wall and fluttered to life. But when she opens her eyes, it is Mac she sees, smiling, from the mouth of the alley. The kid’s mouth is ringed with purple, like she’s been eating a cartoon eggplant. Eva must’ve given the kid sweets.

  The kid catches sight of Dany and runs, full throttle, throwing her little body at Dany’s chest. Even knowing what’s coming, the weight of the kid surprises her, and Dany clutches at Mac, falling on her ass.

  Eva,
smiling, jogs up behind.

  “Oh my God,” Eva says. “She’s just like randomly happy to see you. I swear, I’m not that bad of a babysitter.”

  The strange feeling Dany had, only a minute ago, is gone. It’s as if the weird feeling can be erased by the life energy that emanates from Eva and Mac. Dany grins at her friend, so entirely grateful that she can’t even speak.

  Thank you, she wants to tell Eva. But what she means is so bright and shiny and big, the words can’t fit inside of her mouth. She looks at Eva, and maybe something of that is on her face.

  “Yeah, you’re welcome,” Eva says, laughing.

  Dany looks over the kid. All in one piece, and the nose plug there, in its customary place. Eva has taken care of everything. Mac is safe.

  “We need to tell Bea,” Dany says, nodding at the big house. “We need to make her come with us.”

  The smile disappears from Eva’s face. She nods, and together they head towards the house.

  The three of them stand in front of Bea’s sliding glass door. Eva looks at Dany and shakes her head.

  “Something’s wrong,” Eva says quietly.

  The garden hose has been left running. This, in spite of water tariffs and badly depleted reservoirs. On the picnic table, three buckets have been set out. One is full to overflowing and the others, bone dry. The hose has fallen from the first bucket, and come to rest in a stand of Jerusalem artichoke. Half the roots have been laid bare by the unchecked flow of water, and the garden is a slimy bed of mud.

  Eva shuts off the faucet, and Dany peers into the dark house.

  The screen door is open and Bea’s curtains flutter in the breeze. The hem is covered in muck. The whole of the house looks lonely, unpeopled. Inside, all is dark and quiet – which is odd. Always, before, there’s been light. Light and music.

  “You better stay here,” Dany says. Without waiting, she slips through the curtain.

  In the pale light that passes through the curtains, Dany can make out muddy footprints leading through the living room. “Bea?” she calls.