The Answers

by Catherine Lacey

  Ed draped a thin, white sheet over her body to the chin, and only then did she realize she didn’t have on the usual shorts and bra, that she was bare in the solid darkness, and she sensed Ed was unclothed, too, though she couldn’t see him.

  We will do something very large today, he said. A surgery. We know you are ready for this, though it is also impossible to be ready.

  A tremendous silence overtook both of them, and one candle extinguished itself and another flame doubled its light.

  Mary felt Ed’s body had gone back to the altar, but she also felt two heavy hands pressing her shoulders flat against the table. Some intangible thing began to fill her, beginning as a coldness in the fingertips and toes, warming as it moved up her limbs, hot as it met her chest, then filling the space between her body and the part of her—the part of anyone—that is not a part of the body. Pushed from herself, the boundaries that held her from the world were broken and her skin seemed to uncoil, spooling out around the room. Language vanished. Any comprehension of suffering or desire vanished. Her memories vanished. Her life meant nothing. And there was no peace like this, being unaware, even, of the idea of peace. This cold wave, this force—it began to multiply, became a small crowd of something like ghosts, working within her as she was supine in her own periphery, watching. These ghosts, it seemed, were her ghosts. They belonged to her. They had already lived her life and died for her. They carried her. They ate her like termites. They fed her dreams and she dissolved into them, saw an island with a rocky coast, saw herself as a child, saw her eyes made of polished silver, her hair tangled with kelp, neck deep in an ocean. She saw a man lighting and extinguishing matches in a pitch-dark room, his face appearing and vanishing, appearing and vanishing again.

  Then she returned to her body. She felt she was crying but there were no tears. She felt as if she were bleeding light, that her blood had been replaced by an endless supply of light and it flooded the room. A home had been created where there had been a homelessness and all at once it became clear, like finding lucidity in a dream, that this loss of herself was so simple, that it was the purest form of love, both visceral and transcendent, and it shook within her like a kind of sex with nothing, sex without a body, sex without sex, an unbodied love that reached far beyond the I love you and the I love you, too, a love that was pure nothing, erasure, completion, a joining, a god, the only reason anyone breathes.

  She woke up wrapped in a sheet damp and sweet-smelling, her lungs aching and her heart beating slow, as if they had been forced to end and rebegin. All the candles had burned out. The room was silent and so dark. Ed was there, she could feel him somewhere in the room but she didn’t know where. Her legs were sore. Her arms were so heavy. There was a memory, slipping from her like a dream at daybreak, of Ed ripping her body apart, of his telling her there was no such thing as anything and that she could destroy and remake herself, destroy and remake herself or just remain destroyed, that there was great power in being destroyed, that her debt meant nothing, her past meant nothing, she was free to live in this world in whatever way she could, that she owed no one anything, that no one owed her anything, that all was uncertain and there was great darkness and great light and no such thing as people. She might have fallen asleep again or this might have all been some kind of dream, too, levels of a dream, layers of places and times she was slipping into or from.

  * * *

  Eventually she was Mary again. Mary in a body. Mary living in Mary’s body in Mary’s clothes, and Ed became Ed again. He was lying on the floor in front of her; she was sitting in the plain wooden chair again. She looked down at Ed’s body, only now noticing the pale freckles that cloaked him. He had cut his hair, and though it was unevenly done, it followed a sort of logic, like a plant. His mouth was thin and wide, his forehead short, his eyes small and shaped in a way that made his kindness clear, unmissable. She looked at his eyelids, little flaps of skin we depend on for darkness, for sleep, for remaining alive. She had an impulse, almost, to touch them, to lean over him and touch his eyelids, those little veils. He held a small black stone in one hand, and a clear crystal hung on a chain above his heart. She did not touch him; she did not need to touch him. They were already one thing, she knew, and the empty space between their bodies was filled with a substance that cannot be named, a substance that was not a substance, not material nor immaterial, invisible yet undeniable. It was only love, she knew, but it was also larger than that, something that had always been, would always be, not love for a person but love without people. He sat up suddenly, eyes still shut, and sang a song in a language she didn’t understand.

  * * *

  Later, on the street the world regreeted her with its usual ambivalence but also, it seemed, an acceptance of how she’d been changed. She walked to that small, neglected park nearby, sat on a bench, lowered her gaze to her knees. Being among all these bodies rushing around—all so urgent over money to make or spend—made her feel even slower and slower still, a stoned feeling or the feeling of being a stone.

  When she looked up again, after some time, she saw two familiar forms, a woman and a man she recognized from her neighborhood, on the bench across the park from her. The woman’s head was bent into the crook of the man’s neck, the two of them warming each other like cats. Her hair could no longer be untangled, and she wore dirty sneakers coming apart at the seams. The man wore a navy uniform and was freckled like Ed with a wild clot of dark hair. Their little smiles had a secrecy and she could feel the tenderness between them radiating, a palpable and encompassing heat. Mary had often seen these two embracing on street curbs, in doorways, under awnings. They always seemed to be saying hello or goodbye, but when she looked at them now, she could see that they could never really leave each other, that they were always in that love.

  And she knew now that what they had, she had it, too, only she had it alone somehow. It was clear then, so painfully clear, that people fell in love to find something in themselves that they’d had all along.

  10

  Mary stood in the large white room, beneath high ceilings. Whatever had changed during yesterday’s work with Ed still felt palpable and large. Time had slowed. She felt every molecule she pulled into her lungs, felt she could almost count them. She stood at the window, watched a ferry ripple through the river. Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on loop, a longing for nothing at all.

  But the script for today’s Relational Experiment would require her to speak. She wasn’t sure what she would say, whether she could say anything, or whether Kurt would be able to see that even in just the few days since they’d met, she’d been irrevocably changed. Had it shifted the meat in her face, reformed the bones? Had it removed something or installed something in her eyes? She felt sure it must have done something visible, changed her in some undeniable way, only she couldn’t get far enough from herself to know what it was.

  She heard steps approaching and saw a hazy reflection of Kurt in the window. She turned to see him, walked toward him as she’d been instructed, smiled as instructed, put her arms around him and let him put his arms around her. He touched her face, stroked her hair not unlike how a person might stroke a cat, firm and methodical.

  He was already talking as they sat, beginning the Personal History and Opinion Sharing Relational Experiment. She didn’t feel any of the awkwardness she’d felt at the Savant House, but it had been replaced by a sense of being near and far from herself, as if she had just moved into a new home, and everything was still hidden in boxes.

  Kurt sat in front her. Kurt’s mouth moved. Kurt’s voice told stories he wanted her to hear. There were his eyes meeting her eyes. There was his hand reaching out sometimes to hold her hand. All she could do was be kind to him. Kindness would be her only compass in getting through these sessions, these alien rituals, acting out a feeling she didn’t have and didn’t want to have.

  Did she know, he asked, that this building used to be a lampshade factory?r />
  He seemed thrilled by this and she couldn’t understand why. She wondered if her face was reflecting his in the correct way. She tried to concentrate on the protocols and rubrics she’d memorized, but they all felt misplaced. Be kind, she thought, just be kind.

  When he’d bought the building, he said, it was totally decrepit, and all these reams of fabric were leaning in the stairwells, deteriorating. Production had stopped in the seventies, and the building’s owner had converted it into artists’ studios, with cheap, thin walls turning each floor into a dozen crumbling units, which some people started living in full-time as their art careers floundered. But Kurt hadn’t realized this—he hadn’t been told there were tenants—so when he began renovations, he didn’t know he was evicting people not just from their studios but from their homes, and unfortunately someone at the Observer found out that a few of these displaced artists were now on the streets, and in an unfortunate coincidence Kurt’s latest film, Trains, featured him as a rail-hopping, green-haired gutter punk named Pitt. And though Kurt never directly and publicly responded to the artist eviction thing, he did feel kind of bad about it, so he spent the guilt on volunteering his name to a housing nonprofit, making an appearance, signing a check, and giving a heartfelt speech at a benefit gala.

  (Mary tried to listen to him as if she were reading a book, the way she dropped out of herself, displaced.)

  But the more Kurt thought about his donations to the housing nonprofit, he told her, the more he worried that it wasn’t enough, because his mother had told him years ago, just before she died, that the only way to stay sane on this earth was to make it your priority to care for others. That otherwise you’d go crazy and cold. And maybe, Kurt said he thought back then, maybe he was going crazy and cold. All he thought of at the time were the renovations and tile choices and lighting fixtures and all kinds of marble. These are the sorts of concerns, he said he thought at the time, that might make a person truly go crazy and cold, and around that time he was asked to volunteer for New Stage, a mentorship program that paired at-risk youth with professional actors. Though Kurt had barely talked to a kid since he’d stopped being one, he said he would do it, be that person who could care for others, be that mentor actor to these kids.

  (Mary remembered what Ed had told her just before she left his office—that she would need to be careful, that she might have too great of an effect on people, might draw them closer to her than she intended—but she was uncertain if she was remembering him saying this or if he was somehow speaking to her now, whispering this into her head from far away.)

  One kid had stuck out to Kurt as potentially talented, though Jason was also the only white kid in the program and Kurt felt weird about giving him any extra attention, though Kurt was genuinely sure (or almost genuinely sure) that he wasn’t being subconsciously racially biased, that he was responding to what he thought was genuine talent, a capacity. After Kurt stopped volunteering for New Stage, he and Jason kept up infrequently, sometimes just phone calls but other times over an expensive lunch, Kurt thinking highly of himself for fulfilling his mother’s ask, for having found a way to care for someone else. At times it seemed his mentoring hadn’t done so much for Jason, whose career suffered endless near misses, making Kurt wonder if he’d either misjudged Jason’s talent or been ineffective in his help. Maybe Jason would have thrived with someone different, someone better, a Clooney or Damon, one of those actors who impressed people by being people. No one ever talked or wrote about Kurt in that way. He believed that people respected him as an actor and artist, but he wasn’t beloved, and it bothered him, and it bothered him that it bothered him. Then Jason started to get a few roles, commercials, a few TV parts, and for years it seemed that he was on the perpetual edge of a breakout. Anticipating that he would soon be genuinely proud of his protégé, Kurt started inviting him to the occasional party he held at the loft, until the third one, when Jason brought some blow, not at all unusual for the crowd, but it unnerved Kurt, seemed like a warning sign of Jason’s impending failure (though when Kurt’s rich, famous friends got high, it was just a symptom of their success). Jason, his face bulging, his hands fluttering, told Kurt he couldn’t wait until people bothered him in the street, until he got recognized anywhere he went, until it was difficult, really fucking difficult, to go out in public. Jason had chewed a cocktail straw into splinters and he inhaled and coughed up a shard.

  You want it to be difficult, Kurt said, to go somewhere? You want to live in that kind of prison?

  Prison! Prison! You’re gonna talk to me about prison?

  Jason wasn’t angry, but he was shouting, eyelids stretched taut. He laughed, slapped his leg, took Kurt’s face in his hands, and kissed him on the lips.

  Ha! Prison. I’m not getting locked up, motherfucker. People are going to know me. People are going to know who I am.

  And as Kurt reached this line of the story, he was struck by the softness of Mary’s gray eyes, how she looked at him like she knew him already, knew him deeply, knew a part of him that even he didn’t know. This, he realized, was why he had been telling her about Jason, about Jason’s desire to be known. It was a way of telling her that he felt she knew him in a way he didn’t even know himself yet. No one, it seemed, really understood how terrible it was to feel unknown beneath a costume of being known, and this was why it hurt so much to see Jason begin to suffer from a desire that Kurt knew so well, only from the other side.

  (And as he said all this to Mary, he felt some kind of dawn breaking in him, his thoughts moving with a new agility. Tears gathered as he looked at her, so placid and plain. He was sure she had done something to him, something dangerous and necessary.)

  They’d fallen more or less out of touch, Kurt and Jason, but Kurt still thought of him often and still had this old photograph of them hanging in his office—a reminder of how Kurt had perhaps failed in some ways and succeeded in other ways of trying to care for someone. When he saw that photo, Kurt sometimes wondered if Jason would ever find the fame he’d wanted, though Kurt knew it would have solved nothing, just reframed the problem, as all successes or failures do.

  They continued this Personal History and Opinion Sharing Relational Experiment for another two hours, alternately speaking and listening, and though Mary was mentally distant from Kurt, he felt that she was with him, completely. She still met all her cues, recited her lines, followed protocols, and it was unclear to her if she was just impersonating affection, or if this impersonation had changed her from within, synthesized a kind of love in her.

  Kurt told a long story about going on a whale-watching trip on a boat with his mother when he was a child, during which they saw no whales but it was the most relaxed he’d ever seen or would ever see her, and as he told this story, his voice began to rush, as if he and Mary only had a minute left together, though they still had plenty. He remembered that she’d bought him an ice cream cone beforehand, then leaned over to bite a chunk out of it while snarling like an animal so that he would laugh, and he couldn’t stop laughing and his laughing made her laugh so much that people waiting on the boat turned to stare so she held him close to her, tried to squeeze themselves quiet again. He remembered how she had her hair wrapped in a scarf with little red flowers, and a man in a corduroy jacket had kept trying to talk to her, and when this man, in what seemed like a last-ditch effort to charm her, called her beautiful, she smiled a go-away smile and told him she was with her son. A person may never be loved more than he was that afternoon.

  As Kurt told her this memory, he held Mary’s hand with both his hands, and when it was over, she noticed how his eyes were low and scattered, troubled, as if he hadn’t meant to tell this story. He asked her to tell him something like that, tell him about a day she’d live again if given the chance.

  (Immediately she thought of but didn’t tell him about one of the first days she and Paul spent together, meeting in Bryant Park, finding two hundred dollars of rubber-banded twenties in the street, which they immediate
ly spent on an elaborate dinner. She’d never felt a desire as strong and mysterious as she had for him then, her body a constant flutter, always near fainting, but she didn’t tell Kurt this story because she couldn’t tell him this story, not really. Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share.)

  She told Kurt about a day she’d spent alone on a beach in Majorca, how the ocean was the perfect temperature and the sand was silky and no one spoke to her. She felt so calm, nearly nonexistent, all day till sunset, light fading into oranges and pinks so surreal she wondered if this could even be the world. Near her two women dozed on their backs, careless and half-naked, and it seemed most of the bodies around her were exposed and asleep. But then some shouting in Spanish broke the silence, which Mary ignored at first, since it seemed joyful or drunk, but soon it was clear that someone was drowning and four or five men were running into the water, diving, swimming, shouting, and soon a body was being brought out, limp and small, a child, a woman, she couldn’t tell. One man hunched over it, breathing into it, until this body removed the ocean from itself, began again.

  Mary told Kurt this story as she had been instructed—by speaking steadily with unbroken eye contact, not censoring herself, not allowing herself to labor over which details to include and which to leave out—but the moment she stopped speaking, she was overcome with all that was happening all at once, everywhere—a man quietly sobbing in the shower, a woman screaming through childbirth, a child happily caking himself in mud, and lovers in airports dropping their bags to embrace each other, and men being shot in the gut, and girls combing one another’s hair in the dusty towns, preening in cracked mirrors, and two people could be sitting in an empty church in some large city, unnoticed, holding hands, ungoverned by the idea of God but still reverent with each other as two red cardinals flew in circles just beyond the stained glass—and how could Mary, how could anyone, go on doing anything when you could feel all this happening, out of sight, out of earshot, but happening all the same, happening to someone, someone you could have loved, someone you did love, someone you love still, deeply, without thinking.