Vanishing

by Cai Emmons

  For the next posture she sat on the floor. She thought it would be easier to stay still, but it wasn’t. Her spine ached and one foot went numb. She was hyper-aware of each beat of her heart. Pain twittered beneath her rib cage and in her shoulders. She tried picturing herself doing athletic things she couldn’t actually do—gymnastics, skiing, swimming the breast stroke—but it didn’t help. To master stillness you needed techniques she didn’t have, focus she didn’t have, the concentration of a yogi. Now more than ever she wanted to talk to Jane.

  She listened to Rupert making his rounds, discussing the way light hit and sculpted her contours. Look at the cheek, he said, look at the shoulder. As if her whole body had no real substance, was made only of light.

  At five o’clock the twilight appeared dark, the tall windows black but for the streetlights. Rupert had turned on the overhead fluorescents, which tinged the students’ faces with gray-green exhaustion. Tasha no longer cared how other people had drawn her, she only wanted to move.

  Wearing Rupert’s coat she ferried her clothes down the hall to the ladies’ room to change. How good walking felt. She dressed in a stall, reveling in the privacy.

  Rupert was waiting in the empty classroom. She gave him his coat and he put it on then exchanged his skull cap for a fedora. Impatience rained from him. “I need to be off. Thank you for filling in. I’ll see about getting you some compensation.”

  He regarded her so intently she looked down at herself to see if her clothes were on backwards. She was fine though her static-y sweater clung like cellophane. She wanted him to say more than thank you, to acknowledge the difficulty of what she’d been through. But she could feel he was trying to get rid of her. She shrugged herself into her cheap leather jacket.

  “Jane was scheduled to be here today,” he said. Tasha nodded. “But she had a heart attack on her way to class.” What was he saying—was Jane dead? “They took her to Beth Israel. I’m going to see her now.”

  “Is she okay?”

  Rupert was already heading out the door, lifting his feet with more conviction than usual as if to assert his own health. They were the only ones in the elevator. Rupert withdrew to the corner, his big-nosed face channeling disaster. Tasha’s unruly art pad thwacked the wall. The elevator churned to the ground floor.

  “Can I come with you?” Tasha said as Rupert thrust out his arm to hail a cab.

  “This isn’t spectator sport. This is serious business.” His kindness had evaporated.

  “I know that.”

  The cab shot off without her. She idled on the corner, riddled with anger. Rupert hated her, that was obvious. Would he take her more seriously if she were disabled like Jane? He didn’t own Jane.

  Tasha’s anger had dimmed a little by the time a taxi dumped her in front of Beth Israel. She left her drawing tablet in the cab on purpose. She would feel like a fool dragging it into a hospital.

  Intensive Care, said the woman at the front desk. Fourth floor. Intensive Care was like a secret society with pneumatic double doors and signs prohibiting cell phones and children. Tasha summoned her courage then brazened in. She found herself in an unadorned ante-room with four chairs. Another set of double doors led to the ICU’s main floor. A window offered a view of the nurses’ station. She hesitated, then pushed through those doors too.

  Curtained bays fanned out from the room’s center. So much activity. Nurses bustling, machines beeping. Desperation swirled like smoke, so many fragile bodies struggling to maintain their grip. Living suddenly seemed like so much work.

  “Jane Flint,” she said to the nurse behind the counter.

  The nurse checked her computer. “She has a visitor.”

  Rupert of course. “I have to wait?”

  The nurse nodded. Tasha had never been in a hospital before and wasn’t sure where to put herself. She returned to the ante-room and sat in a chair. Then she stood. Then she sat again. Each time she thought of Jane in a hospital bed she panicked. She needed Jane to be alive. She thought of the moment when she and Jane had said goodbye at Whole Foods. She bent down to hug Jane’s warm stalwart body and felt linked to Jane in some way she wasn’t linked to anyone else, either here in the city or back in LA. Rupert was taking so damn long.

  There he was, blundering through the doors, doing a double-take when he saw her.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Jane is not a curiosity.”

  “Would I be here if I thought that?”

  He pursed his thin lips. He looked like a gangster in his ridiculous coat. He was watching her as if his gaze alone could evict her. She should never have modeled for him.

  Something drew her attention from Rupert, a summons curling up from Jane’s damaged heart, spinning like a tornado out from behind Jane’s curtained bed, past all the other patients, around the nurses’ station, out the rasping doors to the flesh of Tasha’s own beating heart. Jane wanted to see her.

  “You don’t own Jane,” she said to Rupert.

  Rupert closed his eyes as if to collect himself in the face of her childishness.

  The curtain on Jane’s bay was drawn back and its lights were fully lit. Jane’s face and head were hidden by the rise of her body pushing the sheet into a monument. Tasha ducked past the thicket of tubes and IV bags to position herself at the side of the bed. Jane’s face was splotched red and yellowish-white; her closed lids and lips were purple; her bloated arm lay on top of the sheet, taped with an IV tube. On the other side of the bed a machine beeped out her cardiac status.

  “Jane?” Tasha whispered. The word scurried off. “It’s me, Tasha. Are you all right?” She fixated on the broad forehead which took up most of Jane’s face, picturing the massive brain behind it. “Jane?”

  Jane remained still. Her breathing was too shallow to see. The heart machine nattered on. Tasha’s attention was snagged by a stuffed bear with a red bowtie on the rolling trolley next to the bed. His cutesy smile was infuriating.

  Something happened. A shift. Oozing from the still flesh, a defiant Jane-ness rose and filled the air. A palpable field of energy like heat, but not heat. It surrounded Tasha in a feeling of home. Jane was magnificent. She had probably descended from a long line of Pharaohs and queens.

  The body began to move, almost imperceptibly. Tasha held her breath, a witness to Jane’s returning consciousness. It was like watching a person being rebuilt. A swarming in her cheeks. A cluck in her throat. Tasha would later remember thinking: This is joy. Now she was impatient. Open your eyes, Jane. Give me your full attention. There are so many conversations we need to have! She wanted to tell Jane about modeling today, the way her skin had tingled and itched, about the geyser of uncontrollable restlessness. And you?

  Jane’s eyelids flickered and Tasha’s own eyes, swimming in moisture, mirrored back the flickering. Tasha would recount this moment to Jane over and over in the months to come. The moment you revived. Tasha leaned down and, in a moment of spontaneous worship, planted a kiss on Jane’s flannel cheek. Jane’s arm shimmied. She spread her fingers. Her eyes opened.

  “Hey,” Tasha said. She saw the spark in Jane’s irises, like cigarette tips on a dark football field attesting to the presence of human life.

  Jane’s lips parted. “Heh.”

  “Don’t talk,” Tasha said, though she was dying to hear what Jane had to say. She kept her gaze on Jane’s beautiful monolith of a face and messages traveled back and forth between them.

  A guttural croak. Feral panting. Fluid everywhere. The regular beep was now a keening alarm. Tasha called out.

  People rushed in and surrounded Jane. They bludgeoned her chest with flat blocks. Tasha remained there until a nurse pushed her away and closed the curtain. Tasha didn’t leave. She peered through the slit in the curtain, still holding the thread, still sending messages. Jane was there at the far end of the thread, lobbing messages back.

  A grim-fac
ed man sawed Jane’s chest. This had to be a joke. He looked no more skilled than a carpenter. His tool looked crude. Blood flew everywhere, as if Jane had exploded. The man reached into Jane’s chest. He cradled her heart.

  Tasha gripped her end of the thread. It was all a matter of seeing, and now she saw Jane so very clearly.

  VANISHING

  Betsy Wainwright’s brain was shrinking. Had shrunk. There was no certain diagnosis, only an objectively shrinking brain, measurably smaller in circumference this year than last. Come and celebrate her fifty-first, Betsy’s husband Dan had said to Marty over the phone, at once jaunty and begging. You’re more likely than anyone else to dislodge some of her memories. And bring some of your finest California snake oil.

  Marty, newly single, was free to go wherever she wanted. But Dan’s call brought her up short, shamed her. There was no denying she’d been neglecting her oldest friend who she hadn’t seen for over three years, since before the brain’s shrinking was identified. The length of her friendship with Betsy made it impossible to say no. They’d been three-year-old nursery school rug rats together and, though they’d always had different tastes and led very different lives and often lived for long stretches on different coasts without seeing each other for several years, the hours they’d logged in each other’s company before they were twenty-two had made them almost siblings, and the relationship had hung on where others might have withered. It had the indestructability of a gnarled tree root that eventually becomes a fossil. Despite Betsy’s difficulty, she was thrilling and larger-than-life, and being in her presence had always made Marty feel her own life was larger too. You’re a good egg, they used to tell each other, out of the blue. Marty needed now, more than ever, to feel the possibility of a large life, a large life in which she could still be a good egg and not the self-absorbed person she’d become since her separation.

  It was cold when she set out for New Hampshire from her mother’s house in Massachusetts, and the sky was a monochrome sheet of gray, already churning out tiny flakes. Marty drove her tinny rental car slowly, performing her special trick: rearranging the focal distance of her eyes to see foreground and background simultaneously. It was the trick of one who had made a profession of squinting into a lens, a trick of her eyes, but more importantly a trick of the brain.

  Betsy, Dan had reported, was no longer allowed to drive. If she drove, she lost her way. Once she’d arrived at the grocery store, and locked herself in her car, and couldn’t figure out how to get out. This kind of dysfunction was alarming on so many levels that Marty usually tried not to think of it. Research had revealed that people were more likely to die not only soon after their spouses died, but also when others in their social circles died. What if losing brain capacity was the same way? Betsy’s brain held memories of Marty’s childhood that no one else shared. Betsy’s vanishing memory was like losing a hard drive built over decades, one to which Marty was also wired.

  In dwindling light Marty made her way slowly north through the surface streets to the highway, sucked inside a loop of tests. Should she remember this pink office building? This intersection? This Trader Joe’s? It was true she hadn’t lived here for years, but looking too hard at anything made it recede further from memory. The radio was broadcasting an interview with a thirteen-year-old violinist who would be playing a concerto with the Boston Symphony, written by a composer Marty had never heard of. The violinist, an uncannily precocious girl, spoke of the contrast between the movements, a challenging scherzo followed by a mournful adagio.

  Two months ago Marty and her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Art, split their possessions down the middle—yours, mine, yours, mine—until they got to a stack of things no one wanted, objects shorn of meaning: a behemoth vegetable juicer they’d only used a handful of times, a set of ugly fuchsia bed sheets they had no recollection of buying, moth-eaten winter coats they’d had since their time in New York.

  The day of their move to different apartments in Venice Beach they joked and laughed, the model of cooperation. She kept looking at Art’s lanky body and his long artist’s fingers, and wondering why they hadn’t survived. They’d been such a good couple, he a painter until his recent foray into real estate, she a documentary filmmaker. They had great friends, gave lively parties, struggled together with their art.

  At the end of that day Art got a call. It turned out he was going to France the following week. You never said you were going to France, she said. The look he gave her, a blank horizontal smile like a musical staff without notes, could have been read as pity. She understood she’d forfeited her right to indignation and stopped herself from asking who was going with him.

  Twilight tipped into night and the snow intensified. The Ford Fiesta rattled and cold air seeped through a gap around the driver’s side door. After years of living in California she was out of practice driving in snow and should have demanded a sturdier car. The trucks on all sides of her were equipped with chains, and plows had come out, appearing in her rear view mirror like prehistoric beasts, making a terrible racket. The black asphalt had become a path of white whose edges blurred into sky and falling snow, and occasional gusts of wind slung snow across the windshield, confusing her sense of up and down. She missed Art, the authority of his tall body. When they went on trips together he always drove.

  Betsy Wainwright was also tall—over six feet—and bossy. She was almost beautiful—pictures preserved her that way—but in movement she became unsure of herself, gawky and blustery. Her family, Boston Brahmins with money, lived on a hill with a pond and horses, surrounded by pasture and woods. Her father was a writer and editor-in-chief, known in town and well beyond, a famous man himself who hosted famous authors for dinner. Sometimes Marty sat at those dinners, cowed by the erudite conversation about books and politics, nervous someone would ask her a question, uncertain how to serve herself gracefully from the dishes offered on the left by the maid. She always hoped Betsy would find a way to get them excused early.

  But being excused had its own perils. Betsy often led her down to the pasture where they would ride the horse and pony bareback. This terrified Marty though she never said so. If you were timid, and prone to accommodating, and small as Marty was back then, it was only natural to go along with things. Bucky, the pony with the inauspicious name, was the one Marty was always instructed to ride. She clung to the bristly mane and held her breath as Bucky cantered after Betsy’s horse, Simba. There was no slowing Bucky down, no convincing him he need not keep up with his longer-legged friend. For Marty there was only enduring. Her rump bumped over the pony’s bony back like a pinball. She dreaded falling off, so easily could have. Betsy had stories of the horse girls around town “cracking their heads open.” She would report this as if it was funny, and Marty envisioned a skull fractured like watermelon rind, a cross-sectioned brain spilled out and bleeding into the grass.

  The car began to fishtail. She cast off her gloves to gain more control of the wheel and steered into the skids. Her eyes telescoped toward the road, but the traffic had thinned and with no cars nearby there seemed to be no road at all, so she felt as if she was bombing forward on a pathless journey like those charted through space.

  Her eyes pressed the white-dark for information, road signs, lights of towns, some confirmation she was on the right course. A mastodon lumbered into view then cartwheeled into an amoeba. A donkey lay out there, heaving in pain, spindly legs twitching. The whapping of tires against snow was indistinguishable from her own rough breathing. For god’s sake, Martha, it’s not a donkey, only a thin strand of unbidden memory.

  Betsy’s and Marty’s lives took radically different directions sometime after college. Betsy, after a few dalliances, married Dan and got busy taking refuge from the world, building a house resembling her parents’ house and raising their two children, Justin and Helen, on the hill in the New Hampshire countryside where Marty was now headed. Betsy had been on that hill for over twenty years. Was it
possible, Marty now wondered, that Betsy had withdrawn from the world because her brain already, way back then, told her it was shrinking?

  Marty, during that time, was throwing herself at the world. Ambitious (Betsy used to kid her about that), she went to graduate school, studied film, moved West, fashioned herself into a filmmaker. Movies? Eee-gads! Betsy had said when she learned of Marty’s interest in film. Betsy, like her family, had always spurned popular culture—movies, TV, rock and roll, all brainless entertainment aimed at the low-level tastes of The Great American Public. It’s not Hollywood, Marty explained of her film portraits of immigrant women. It’s documentary. But it was all the same to Betsy, and by then Marty was able to slough Betsy’s mocking. Despite her native timidity, Marty often said to herself about her own choices, especially recently, that she had gone out and faced the world, put herself into the fray. Maybe she didn’t have a lot to show for it, maybe she had lost more than she’d won, but she couldn’t be accused of shying away. She and Art had met and married in their early thirties. Neither wanted kids—who needed all that time chained to the house, all those trips to the ER to extract wasabi peas from noses. At some point Marty and Betsy, both good eggs, began to laugh companionably about their differences.

  Still, Marty would always remember the times when Betsy’s view of the world had to prevail. Once, in junior high, they biked on a Saturday morning to the school science fair. By the time they arrived Marty wasn’t feeling well. I think I’m going to be sick, she told Betsy. Oh, you’re not sick, Betsy said, turning and striding quickly inside while Marty vomited on the stairs just outside the front door, so everyone coming and going saw.

  Or the trip to Yosemite. It was during or after college, she couldn’t quite remember. Betsy and Dan were together, but weren’t yet married. Marty had flown from New York to Santa Cruz where Betsy and Dan were living at the time, and they had driven to Yosemite to cross-country ski. But it had been raining and they spent the better part of a day driving around in search of a place with snow from which to embark. Finally they settled on a trail that led them through the flat-lands over sticky snow, trees dripping overhead, skis scratching exposed rocks and twigs, nothing vaguely majestic about the scenery. Eventually they took off their skis and carried them, like unruly chopsticks, back to the car, arriving just before another downpour.