The Heavens

by Sandra Newman

  They came up a pitch-dark flight of steps and had to buzz to be let into the open wards. Here, patients in the corridors stared and shuffled, and Asperger’s Andy announced who Ben was in a deafening, seal’s-bark voice. The walls were covered in advertising posters for candy, fast food, cigarettes—anything a mental patient might crave and ask to have bought for them by guilt-stricken relatives. Even the hospital pajamas had a NyQuil logo with a picture of a sleeping kitten. From open doors came the chatter of the therapeutic radio that played all day and couldn’t be shut off; once Ben had brought Kate earplugs, but they were confiscated and Ben was told officiously that Stanford had done a study where the therapeutic radio worked. Still, he couldn’t forgive the radio; its cloying inspirational jabber embodied his feeling that this wasn’t a place that cured sick people but a dungeon where hapless people were imprisoned and methodically driven insane.

  They found Kate in the cafeteria, drinking a vending-machine coffee from a paper cup. No one else was there; the cafeteria didn’t serve food at that hour, and the more functional patients were all in the TV room. There was a faucet dripping in the kitchen and a sluggish water bug inspecting a spill in the corner by the vending machine. Everything was ugly, plastic, stain resistant, beige. Kate had the baby in its sling, and Ben fought a wave of queasy ambivalence. He was attached to the baby, of course. He’d seen it a few hours after it was born, when it was still red faced and amphibian, and had felt the terror of a parent at its blind fragility; he’d held it a few times, and its tiny warmth had pacified and moved him. Now, at five weeks, it was uncannily perfect: black eyed and button nosed, a thoughtful mammal that peeped and frowned as if working out a problem and still lived in a world of self, a universe with only one conscious subject. The baby was a locus of magic, and Ben was not immune to the baby’s spell.

  At the same time, the baby was a locus of pain—not only because of José but because of Kate who couldn’t really be a mother, who was clinically insane, who couldn’t remember its name and would call it interchangeably Ryan or Salman or the nonsense syllable “Qued,” who was terrified that someone would take it away (as someone should probably take it away), and whose way of coping was to act as if the baby were invisible to everyone but her. She didn’t like people to mention it. She kept its face covered by its sling.

  Sometimes Ben defied this and said hello to the baby and insisted on seeing it, with mixed results. Oksana’s presence was an added complication. He decided not to risk it as Kate stood up.

  Then the moment that always went through him. It was Kate. It wasn’t just an awful situation, it was Kate—albeit paunchy and exhausted in the aftermath of childbirth, her dramatic black hair eliminated by a ponytail, her face gaunt and ordinary in the mean light. She moved stiffly, coming to greet them, and he thought, They’re torturing her; they’re killing her. But of course, she’d just given birth. Anybody might look that way if they’d just given birth.

  With Oksana there, Kate didn’t try to seem sane. Instead, she talked to Oksana as if Oksana were visiting from Kate’s alternate universe, where everything was happy and nice. For Ben, it was gratingly narcissistic—Kate projecting her fantasies on Oksana, who was reduced to a prop in Kate’s game of make-believe. But Oksana didn’t seem put out when Kate asked about Oksana’s documentary films or her organization that rescued mail-order brides. She just explained in her tuneless voice that she didn’t do all that, she was a stripper. Then (fingernails down a blackboard to Ben, but apparently fine with Oksana) Kate looked stricken and apologized for making a world where Oksana was a stripper—as if Oksana agreed that stripping was awful and that Kate had made the world.

  “I thought I could change it all back,” Kate said, “but it doesn’t really work like that. All the timelines exist now and can’t be erased. I’ve made all these terrible realities. I mean, this one feels like it’s terrible. Is it terrible?”

  “It’s terrible,” said Oksana.

  “I’m sorry,” Kate said. “I wish I could fix it.”

  “Kate, you don’t have to be sorry,” said Ben. “It’s not real. You didn’t really create the world.”

  “I’m talking to Oksana now,” Kate said. “Oksana doesn’t mind if I’m crazy.”

  “Yes,” Oksana said. “Here, we’re in the crazy hospital. I don’t come if I don’t want to hear a crazy thing.”

  Encouraged, Kate described her latest delusion, in which she’d gone to visit Shakespeare in a dream and asked him how to cure her insanity. He’d told her to kill herself, so she’d obediently stabbed herself in the throat. She’d fainted on the stage—this was at the Globe—and had naturally assumed she would die.

  But she’d stabbed herself through the front of the throat. Another patient here had made the same mistake, and he said she might have only nicked the jugular, or even just cut some bullshit artery like the thyroid artery. Then the blood loss would be minor. Some people even suffocated slowly from the damage to the trachea. It could take twenty minutes to die.

  So now, in her dreams, she kept returning to that scene. The pain was unbearable and drove her to wake; she could only stay for seconds at a time. In one dream, they carried her from the stage. In the next, they’d made it to the outside stairs. It took ten dreams—ten nights—before she was bundled into her friend Southampton’s barge to be taken to a doctor. All the time, she was in agony, choking, and cold as if her body were all bared bone. Then the following night. It came back and back. She couldn’t escape the dream.

  And, in waking life, she was plagued by visions of a post-apocalyptic city. It was a thing she’d seen in dreams before, but now it could appear when she just closed her eyes. She saw the burnt remains of the long-dead world; she felt its sticky ashes on her skin. In those moments she knew the apocalypse would come. The world would burn. There was no point in anything. Worse—everything she’d ever done had brought the world’s extinction closer.

  Here Kate paused and looked for a reaction. Her hand was stroking the fabric of the sling—the baby’s back—in a mechanical gentling motion, and now Ben noticed she was still wearing his engagement ring. The last time he’d visited, she’d told him she didn’t remember accepting the ring and said she’d always hated engagement rings. But then when he’d asked for it back, she’d cried.

  Ben said carefully, “It seems like a dark vision.”

  “Not really.” Kate made a face, as if Ben were being overdramatic. “After all, it’s not news that we’re destroying the world. We’re obviously destroying the world.”

  “It’s right,” said Oksana. “It’s true.”

  Ben said, “Have you told your psychologist about this?”

  “I think you’re missing the point,” said Kate.

  “The psychologist should know,” Ben said, trying to keep his voice calm. “It seems like it could be a bad development.”

  Oksana said to Kate, “I think you shouldn’t die in this dream. You dream instead that your neck heals, and it’s better. You don’t have any problems like this.”

  “No,” Kate said. “Then I’d keep having the dreams, and every dream makes things worse. I’ve already erased my brother. I’m sorry, I know you don’t believe all this.”

  Ben said, “So you realize this is your sickness?”

  There was a pause like the pause of leaping over a chasm and the film going into slow motion, then Kate said, “No. I’m going to leave so I want to be honest.”

  “You’re going to leave?” said Ben. “What does that mean?”

  Kate’s face became paranoid, her eyes bright with a chilling superiority. It was blatantly the face of a crazy person. Ben was physically affected. He was hit with a nausea that seemed to begin in his eyes.

  He said, in the coolest voice he could muster, “When you talk like that, I have to be worried you’re thinking of killing yourself. Do you see that?”

  “No,” Kate said in an odd, prim voice. “It seems like a bit of a leap.”

  “Then what do you mean
by saying you’re leaving? Does it mean you’re going home to Ohio?”

  Kate grimaced. “I’m not from Ohio. I’ve never been to Ohio in my life.”

  Ben almost went into his well-worn explanation about her childhood in Cincinnati. But then he saw Kate knew. She was insisting on her favorite delusion—the one where her parents had stayed together and they lived in Manhattan and were Kate’s best friends—but she knew. He was blindsided by a wash of despair. The baby was stirring now, and it made him so miserable he was afraid.

  He said hoarsely, “Your mother was going to come and take you home to Ohio. I’m just asking, is that what you mean about leaving?”

  “You don’t listen to me, or you’d know what I mean. I take your reality seriously. I treat it with so much respect, even though I’ll only be here a couple of days. And you don’t even listen.”

  Then his hands were in fists and he was saying, “My reality is real. It’s everyone’s reality. That’s how we know what’s real, Kate.”

  The baby stirred again, twitching in its sling. Kate looked down to it and said in a baby-softened voice, “Please don’t attack me.”

  “I’m not attacking you. I want you to focus on getting better. If you aren’t going to talk to the psychologist—”

  “There’s no point. It’s a waste of time.”

  “It isn’t,” said Ben helplessly. “It’s how you get better.”

  “No one really gets better that way.”

  “So how do you plan to get better?”

  “I’m leaving. I’m leaving this history. I said.” Then Kate sat back and was suddenly crying—crying and violently rubbing her forehead, as if she were trying to crush her thoughts. The baby bleated and kicked in protest. Oksana stared at Ben with a fixed, flat hostility.

  He muttered to himself, “I can’t cope with this shit. I can’t. I’ll go insane myself.”

  Then Kate leaned across the table and shouted, “So don’t come back! I didn’t tell you to come. You just punish me. You don’t even know!”

  Ben stood up, and Kate raised her hands as if warding off a blow. The baby earsplittingly wailed. He hated her so much at that moment, he was high on it. He could have thrown the table across the room. He could have broken a window with his head.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t come back. I wouldn’t want to stand between you and your psychosis. Have a great life as a mental patient. I’m sure you made the right choice.”

  He left—and was surprised to find Oksana had followed him. All down the bright corridors and then the dark corridors, she shadowed him, her sneakers squeaking on the wet floor. Outside, where the chewed-up junkies were still lined up in a miasma of cigarette smoke because the methadone clinic still hadn’t opened, Oksana stopped him and talked for ten minutes, so intently her teeth seemed gritted against it. It was about Kate’s belief that Oksana ran an organization that rescued mail-order brides. Oksana said she’d once been a mail-order bride, and she was beaten and raped by her shit husband, then she ran away and lived with other shits who fucked her; she had no money so it was her life. She was breathless, spitting the words. The junkies all listened with a quiet recognition; they listened as if they might like to join in. Ben kept glancing at them while she talked. He was too tired to listen properly.

  At the end, she said, “What Kate thinks, it’s beautiful. I wish I made this, for women like me. If I can help some person, even one person, I can maybe be okay. But I don’t. Kate thinks I’m a good person, but I’m nothing person. I’m shit.”

  When she stopped talking, Ben pulled himself together and said, in his best sympathetic voice, “I know how you feel. Kate thinks I’m a good person too. Or she did.”

  “It’s wrong,” said Oksana. “You are not a good person.”

  Then she took off Ben’s jacket and threw it on the ground. The junkies burst into applause. It wasn’t clear if they were clapping for her outburst or for her bra. Ben was suddenly afraid of them. Afraid of Oksana.

  She said, “I am ashamed I come here with you. You talking to a sick woman like it’s an animal. You are evil. You are like Satan.”

  The junkies cheered again as Oksana walked off, with her naked back hunched and pink from cold. Ben tried to remember Oksana was crazy. He tried to think about how funny it would sound when he told Kate later. But no, he would be telling Alicia, who wouldn’t understand, who would be horrified and pity him. Whom he therefore couldn’t tell.

  And the wind blew over the city (just a day like any other) and the sky was blue. Ben picked up the jacket but forgot to put it on. He walked to the subway with it crumpled in his hands and didn’t know for a long time why he was cold.

  That spring, ExxonMobil moved Ben to Houston. He fell out of touch with his New York friends. So it was Kate’s mother, Ágota, who emailed to tell him that Kate had died in a hospital in Ohio. There had been a fire; she’d died of smoke inhalation. There wasn’t any reason to believe she’d suffered.

  22

  And the city

  black and white

  its cinders and ice. The broken planet venting its innards in smoke. Rocks raining from inimical space. The husks of dead beetles that had gathered in drifts; the black eons beyond the world’s end. Her brain all ash. It blew apart, became nothing but the skyline engraved on the skin of her eyes. Was a time where she was nothing. There was no one in the world. Couldn’t breathe. And screamed:

  Kate woke in Ohio at a bathroom sink. She was gripping the cold sink, in grateful tears, alive and not sorry for the things she had lost. She was real. There were people. She could breathe and there was air. She was at her mother’s house and it was raining outside. She heard the rain and heard her baby crying in her bedroom. But she didn’t think of going to him yet. She breathed.

  In the corner of the sink, there was a white ceramic soap dish shaped like a stylized scallop shell. It had a soapy residue but held no soap. On the sink’s other side was a kitchen sponge: a yellow rectangle with a forest-green scouring pad. It looked weather-beaten, and the scouring pad had a long white hair entangled on its surface. Beside it stood a bottle of apple-scented hand wash, translucent green with a white dispenser beak. It had a price tag on it, wrinkled from being in water but still bright red. It had cost $3.69.

  How would you describe such objects to a person like Will Shakespeare? Had Kate made them, and if she had, should that make her proud or ashamed?

  Well, she’d tried to save the world, when she’d thought about the world. It shouldn’t matter that she was insecure and vain, that she didn’t only want to save mankind, but to be the great heroine who’d saved mankind. That she’d wanted a world where she could matter—as Will wanted a world where he wrote great plays, as Alexander wanted a world where he conquered Asia. It was the nature of consciousness to care about itself. Put a consciousness anywhere in time, and it would spawn new worlds from its spasms of ego. Thus the ugly kitchen sponge and the government of stooges; the cheap hand soap and the death of the seas.

  But now all Kate wanted was for Kate to be a person. To live like anyone, to die and forget. It was the only change she wanted in the world.

  Behind the kitchen sponge was Ben’s engagement ring, which Kate had taken off to wash her hands—a trite diamond solitaire she’d found on her finger one morning long after Ben had gone. Now she put it on and paused. The rain had stopped, but the wind was gusting harder. It sounded as if it hurt the windows. Her son had fallen silent and she felt an old panic, the urge to check that her son was still breathing. She could go to her son and never answer the door. Never answer the phone and never open her mail. She could hide in this small, dull life.

  But as she thought of it, the doorbell rang.

  She went downstairs, compelled and afraid. José was at the door. His rental car was in the driveway. He was ill at ease, too neatly dressed. His hair looked freshly cut. It was exactly as if it were the one real world and he were here to visit his son.

  And she remembered a time
in a different real world—in the world where the baby had been Oksana’s, in the months just after that baby was born—when they’d rented a canoe and gone out on the lake. She’d sung “Tom o’Bedlam” while José rowed. It was a beautiful day, but José had been strange, making odd, nervous jokes that didn’t quite land. He was troubled in a way that wasn’t like José. In the middle of the lake, she realized. She said it out loud, and he stopped rowing and sat with his sweaty hands clutching his knees. She said, “No, you’re another one. I know what you are.” Then she talked and begged, but he stared and couldn’t hear. He was away with the treacherous world.

  And, as Will had once hated her, she hated José—or the stranger from the future who inhabited José, who was here to save the world because Kate had failed. She wanted to tell him he would also fail, and the world would burn and the insects die, and the blackened towers stand in lifeless space.

  But he was suffering. The light shimmered over the lake. On the shore, children laughed and threw bread to swans. He was real. He was sweating and trying to wake. And in all the green world, there was no one else. Alone in this doomed and carefree world, he was feeling what she felt.

  At last, she lay against him in the bottom of the boat and they stared at the sky until it passed. She sang “Tom o’Bedlam” to the dumb blue sky. And he said, “Don’t go into the hospital in Ohio. If you go to the hospital there, you die.”

  For a while then, they were friends. It was the time when she was finishing the mural at Martin’s. He would come and sit with her while she painted, and they would talk about anything but. Often, they discussed politics, always skirting the issue of where events led, of the future that presumably was preying on his mind. And that feeling of the two of them together in a room—he was real, and the deep well, the shadow of the world. He was her same height, and when they walked down the street together, they seemed to be coasting on the same level, buoyed by the same inexpressible thing.