by K. Chess
He did them all, in order. He did them each more than once, over the course of months. This was their ritual. They were strange to her, these novels she could only ever know through Vikram’s words. In his former life, he’d been an adjunct, assigned every semester to teach introductory survey courses on American literature in general. Only once had the department head deigned to allow him to lead a final-year seminar on Sleight.
Here, Vikram was the world’s de facto expert.
“Look at the publisher,” she said now, pointing to the title page. “That imprint doesn’t exist here. This isn’t a hoax.”
Was she boring her audience? Maybe Donaldson didn’t like books. Hel herself never had. “I mean, there’s other stuff, too.” She shut The Pyronauts. “This is the tip of the iceberg. People saved all kinds of things, carried them through. Thousands of people and their keepsakes. Statistically, some of it must be art.”
“You have access to these things,” Donaldson said. “To people’s treasures. And you want to put together an exhibit.”
“I want to make a museum. Not just for the stuff itself. The stories. There are so many memories behind each physical object. A museum of vanished culture.”
“A museum,” Donaldson repeated. “Do you know very much about what that would entail?”
“No, I don’t. But this is the hook, I think,” Hel said. “Sleight. I think he is the perfect focus for all of this.”
“Why?”
Hel reached out and took a drink from the tray of a passing waiter, buying herself a minute to think. The drink tasted not unfamiliar. Champagne and peach. Maybe something harder underneath. She wasn’t going to say anything about 1909 this time. Every time she did, people said she was crazy. She had to win Donaldson over more cleverly than that.
She could tell it like a story. If she had a son still—if Jonas were here, if he’d somehow magically remained that tale-craving age he’d been when she last saw him—she might have told it to him as a ghost story.
Once upon a time, there was a little boy whose mother died. His father, a busy and important man, loved him very much, but did not know how to raise a child on his own. He arranged to send the boy to a large estate in the country. Years before, it had been a rich man’s house, but now it was a school. There, the boy would learn to become old enough not to frighten adults.
In the grand entranceway of the school hung a painting in a heavy gilt frame, the centerpiece of the dead rich man’s collection. Actually, there were half a dozen paintings displayed there, but the boy only ever looked at this one, the biggest.
The sky took up the top two-thirds of the canvas, a morning rendered in transparent layers of blue and gold and white and pink. Sun shone behind pillars of dramatic cloud, the brushstrokes of the master hard to see. The boy might have been immersed by that sky, if that were all there was to it, but his eyes were always dragged lower, where two icebergs sat at the horizon, much smaller than the cloud towers. Even smaller, at eye level, a ship floundered, broken in an Arctic sea, its masts tilted at a horrible angle. Men in sailors’ clothing crowded the deck of the sinking vessel.
When the boy looked at the painting, he imagined what these men were doing, imagined their hurry as they ran from stern to bow. He imagined how they must be trying to remain calm. But that wasn’t what scared him. In the water in the foreground, in front of the ship, a hand extended out of the water. It was tiny, in relative scale, but it was the most important thing in the painting, the most important thing in the whole big sea. The skin was very white against the dark water. That pale hand and part of the forearm were all that showed, the rest of the man invisible beneath, groping blindly for a rope the others had tossed futilely in his direction.
The boy knew the passive reaching fingers would never find it. The man would freeze. He would drown.
But why? Where was his other arm? Why was he not thrashing to save himself, where was his gasping mouth? Why couldn’t he struggle up to the surface?
Every morning, students assembled in the wood-paneled foyer. They ordered themselves by age, oldest in the back. Short for his age like his father and slightly built, the boy could usually only just see over the top of the head of the younger boy who stood in front of him. Each year, his part of the line moved back to make room for the new class of pupils. Each year, the boy stood at a greater remove from the place where the painting hung. But he always remembered what it looked like at close quarters. He always remembered the small, harrowing tragedy of that hand amid the greater disaster.
On the grounds of the school was a lake, calm and warm and not very deep. In the springtime the lower forms splashed and paddled by the shore while the larger, stronger adolescents rowed about in boats. The few boarders who remained over the summer holiday—as the boy always did—took swimming lessons by the wooden dock. The murky, opaque green water was perfectly safe, everyone told him, but thinking of the painting, he never dared venture farther than the bank. He bore the others’ teasing with patience.
How did Helen Nash know all this?
In letters home to his father, the boy would write about the painting and the thrall of fear it held him in. And he would grow up. He would leave the school, but he would never forget. He would tell his fiancée about his shipwreck dreams, and she would note this in her personal journal and someday, when he was famous, every scrap of paper that documented his life would be scrutinized by others, and those entries and letters—true stories—would be a part of the story told about him. People would say they explained why he turned out the way he was.
Always, the boy who became Ezra Sleight knew better than to enter dark water. Out there, something could pull you down.
As a man, he returned to the school and found the painting, which still hung there. He was shocked to see how small the hand was. It did not stand out starkly in the composition the way he remembered. Some onlookers would not have even noticed it. Still, it remained important to the man Sleight.
He didn’t know it, but the hand had saved his life.
“It’s art,” Hel finished. “It’s history.”
“But Ezra Sleight did die,” Angelene said. “So, the painting was never painted in this world, or what?”
“No, it was. It’s called The Shipwreck and it was done by George Lowery, a sort of obscure British artist living in Denmark in the 1820s and ’30s.” There was murmured acknowledgement from those listening. They were art people—did they recognize Lowery’s name? Hel continued. “The painting was completed and exhibited in Paris in 1828. It’s well documented up through the turn of the twentieth century, but as far as I can tell, no one knows where it is now.” Right around the time of Sleight’s death. She didn’t know how to end her story without placing an emphasis on Sleight and her theory of the first divergence that might make them write her off as a crackpot. “The Shipwreck is the kind of thing I’m talking about, for the museum, if it could be found. Not just artifacts from UDPs, you know. Things from here too, that relate to there.”
“It’s a good story,” Donaldson said. “May I?” Hel nodded her consent and the other woman lifted the book out of her hands, riffling its pages delicately. “You’re going to need to have more than an anecdote. Here—will you come with me?” Donaldson turned, heading toward the door.
Hel followed along in her wake, wondering if this was some kind of brush-off, if Donaldson meant to escort her out of the party, but no, Donaldson still had the book. Surely she would have passed it back if she wasn’t interested. They stopped in front of the table at the front. The flow of incoming guests had slowed; the employee at the table was now doing something on her phone. She seemed to sense Donaldson coming and looked up alertly. “Ayanna.”
“How’s it going up here?”
“Not much action. Hotel guy says the dining room is all set up. The silent auction ends in ten—they should be giving everyone a reminder in a minute—and then the cater servers will start herding everyone in to their tables.”
“Good work. Do you have a moment? I want you to meet Helen Nash. Helen, this is Teresa Klay, my intern. Teresa, Helen has an idea for an exhibit that I’d like to explore, in preparation for a presentation to the board. I thought you could help her do some research.”
Teresa Klay raised her eyes. She had dark hair that curled wildly, tied back from her face, and the style of eyeglasses that Hel had learned was worn by people who wanted to signal that they were serious. “Of course,” Klay said. “What’s the concept?”
“Ezra Sleight. He’s some kind of a cult UDP author who died as a child.”
“I wouldn’t say cult,” Hel broke in. “I mean, he was kind of a household name.”
“Helen’s a UDP,” Donaldson explained. She looked back over her shoulder at the people dancing and drinking and networking on the ballroom floor. “I’ll need you after the auction, Teresa, to supervise packing up the stuff. But for now, I’ll leave you two to work out the details.”
“Fine.”
“Hello,” Hel said. “It’s nice to meet you.”
The other woman didn’t respond. She was busy giving Hel a searching look, taking in, Hel imagined, her odd dress, her short-bitten nails, and probably the bags under her eyes—looking at her intently and unselfconsciously, as though, if she stared hard enough, she might find some bigger warning sign on Hel’s person, something on the level of Oliveira’s pincers that would demonstrate how radically she didn’t belong here.
Alien. That’s what they called people like her.
Don’t treat everyone like an enemy, her liaison officer told them at Reintegration Education.
Breathe deep.
“How do you feel about meeting at the Brooklyn Public Library?” Klay was saying. “I have an archivist friend there. I could do Tuesday morning, next week.”
“Tuesday would be fine.” Hel noticed that Angelene had joined them and was standing at Klay’s elbow with two more of the fizzy pink drinks, waiting for a chance to join the conversation.
“The library is in Grand Army Plaza,” Klay told her.
The worst thing about her displacement status, Hel sometimes felt, was being treated like an out-of-towner, a tourist in her home city. “Yeah, I know where it is. I can meet you at the main entrance, right outside the terminus.”
“The terminus?”
“Where the trolleys . . .” As soon as she began to say the words, she knew they were wrong. But it was too late.
“Girl, they really did a number on you, didn’t they.” Angelene extended one of the flutes to her.
Klay didn’t laugh at her mistake. Didn’t even look up. She sat at the table, entering the appointment into her calendar app, as if nothing had happened.
Hel decided to interpret this as a courteous gesture. She drank deeply. “I know where it is,” she reiterated. “I’ll see you there.”
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT: JOSLAN MICALLEF, AGE 22, RIKERS ISLAND
Sure, I got wild and I did all those things to that old lady. Beat her. Made her eat salt. Cut her on the breasts. Then stabbed her and stabbed her till she died. I admitted to it in the trial, and I’m admitting to it now. I take full responsibility for my crimes ’cause I know I belong in the juice. I deserve it.
My lawyer is the one who wanted me to file a civil complaint alleging police misconduct. She keeps telling me I’m “on trial in the press” right now and that we need to fight back. Her name is Shevita Young and everything I know about the laws here, I learned from her. I’ve been found guilty of murder and multiple counts of aggravated assault. No matter, says Shevita. If we can show the world the ways that I’ve been failed—by inadequate support from the Reintegration Education and Adjustment Counseling Authority and by the ineptitude of my therapist, by a shitfoot of a dealer who preyed upon my ignorance of the potency of street drugs here, by anti-UDP bias against me in my initial trial, and by simple mishandling such as is evident in my encounter with the police—all that can help me. She seems to think that if she can get a jury to see how pathetic I am, they’ll feel too bad to pin me.
Pin me. Where I’m from, that’s slang for getting executed. Because they use the firing squad method there, and that means they shackle you to a chair with a hood over your head and literally pin a paper target to your chest first before they hand out the guns. So, pinning.
Shevita loves it when I mess up my idioms like that, especially when there are reporters around, but they don’t have the death penalty here. Not in this New York State; what I’m looking at is life in prison.
I understand that, and I also understand what “on trial in the press” means. I’m not dumb. They do get us newspapers here in the Rose on Rikers.
It was a couple of hours after I’d killed Ms. Kravitz when the sticks came by my place. I wasn’t a suspect yet, just the last person who would have been expected to see her alive, being scheduled by the care agency to get her up and do her meds and all. I let them in when they buzzed—thought I had to. I was coming down by then, but I was still pretty out of it. I’d cleaned myself up, but not well enough. I guess there was still a lot of blood on my clothes, and I couldn’t really control the way I was talking. Also, I had her dog, Mimi, with me in my apartment.
The two police asked me questions. Shevita says there’s some statement they’re required to read—anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law—and I don’t remember them saying that to me, but I’m not mad about it. The state I was in, I bet I would have incriminated myself even if they had read it like they were supposed to. It only took five minutes or so of us talking for me to confess, in detail, to what I’d done, and then they were placing me under arrest, radioing for backup. I was put in those zip-tie handcuffs—I didn’t try to stop them from putting them on me—and I sat in my apartment alone with them, waiting for their backup to come.
“You’re one fucking remorseless bitch, aren’t you?” the smaller of the two sticks said.
There’s only one person in this world who knows the person I used to be. Shevita dug her up as a character witness at my first trial; a former classmate’s older cousin who happens to be another one of the Hundred Fifty-Six Thousand. What are the chances, right? The authorities resettled this woman in Seattle. She’s got cancer now from the rad exposure, like most of the people from the final lots. She knew me before, but all she remembered was me playing Dusty Peach dolls on the carpet with her cousin fifteen years ago, so it did me no good.
I allowed that I probably was a pretty remorseless bitch.
“We never should have let any of you through,” the stick said.
I told him that I could see his point. I’d made a mess.
Personally, it’s the salt that bothers me, more than the stabbing.
I want to blame the drugs, but it’s my brother back home who had that weakness. They do brain scans on everyone at eighteen there, which is the legal drinking and smoking age, before they assign you to your military or Alternative Service unit. My scans came out fine, but he was found to have the propensity for dependence. Of course, it already was too late for him; he’d been wilding for four years with older friends and he was well and good addicted. When they did the aversion therapy on him, it didn’t work the way it was supposed to. They just stamped NO CONTROLLED SUBSTANCES on his ID, so he couldn’t buy legally. Within a year, he’d moved on to the hard stuff you can’t buy in stores anyway—to grind and H and dross.
He used to hit his wife, my sister-in-law. He’d threaten her with pliers, say he was going to pull out all her teeth. Made her eat salt by the spoonful until she vommed all over the kitchen. Who knows why.
I would have said I hadn’t thought of that in years, but it wasn’t true. I must have remembered.
Spoonful by spoonful. Why did I do it?
I sat on my own couch, hands zip-tied behind me, trying to figure it out. To recap, at that point, the two police officers still hadn’t read me my rights (which is a violation of procedure, Shevita says, classified as Abuse of Authority)
and the smaller officer had just called me a remorseless bitch (a curse word, which is therefore classified Discourtesy). Then Mimi, Ms. Kravitz’s little dog, climbed into my lap. She is a hairy, mop-looking thing with an underbite and a sweet temperament, and she’d been there for the whole thing that happened earlier, walking through the blood. Hadn’t put up any resistance at all—really, she should have been embarrassed to let me treat her owner like that. Now, she got in my lap, curled up with a little sigh.
I wouldn’t have hurt her. With my hands restrained, I couldn’t have even petted her, like she probably wanted. But the smaller stick came rushing over, picked Mimi up real quick, like he was rescuing her.
“You fucking aliens,” he said to me. “You’re worse than animals.”
Shevita argues that, used as an insult against a whole category of people, the term alien is similar to an ethnic slur or a racist or homophobic remark and should be considered Offensive Language.
I solemnly affirm that all this happened. The Abuse of Authority, Discourtesy, and Offensive Language. But who cares?
I don’t. I knew—I know—that I deserved it all. I didn’t start out wrong, like my brother did. I always did fine at home, never got into fights, never drank more than a few Mack Bullets. And then I’m here for a year and somehow I’m drinking every morning and in another year, I’m doing drugs I never heard of and wiping some old lady’s ass for minimum wage, and the next thing you know, I am my brother. I’m worse.
