Jane Doe doesn’t cry. She hasn’t cried for a very long time.
It is confusing to be suddenly thinking about her. She is somehow there with me, an intrusion, surplus from the darkness, only being felt now because there is no one I must save. Why? I am a ghost myself, always vanishing. How can I be haunted?
Her name is …
Oh. I—
I know her name.
I walk until I come to a bridge over that milky river which divides and defines this city. I sit on the stone guardrail to wait for the darkness. I feel a weariness in me more frightening than any boy with a broken bottle. I am real enough to break a jaw or a rib defending a child prostitute; not real enough ever to understand that child’s life, her terror, her pain. I can go as mad with rage as any human over a beaten, half-dead infant, and do my very best to murder its abusers—and feel dreadfully satisfied to have done so—but now I think … now I think it is not my outrage and terrible pity I am satisfying; it is all, all of it, happening in that hospital room, behind those closed eyes whose color I do not know.
I gaze down from the bridge, watching a couple of barges sliding silently by, just below me. If I were to leap down to them, right now, would I be killed? Can a dream commit suicide?
Darkness …
that policeman is actively looking for me. We have not met again, but I have seen him from a distance once or twice, during one rescue—one being there—or another.
My ever-faithful darkness keeps returning for me, carrying me off to do battle with other exploiters, other abusers, other muggers, rapists, molesters, gang thugs, drive-by assassins. See me: lithe, swift, fearless, always barehanded, always alone, always conquering … and never in control, not of anything, not of the smallest choice I make. She is. I am certain of that now.
My missions—her missions—have always favored children, but lately they seem to feature them constantly, exclusively. More and more I wake to other massage parlors—endless, those—and trucks crammed full of ten-year-old immigrant laborers packed into shipping crates. Garment sweatshops in basement factories. Kitchens in alley diners. Lettuce fields outside the city. At the airport I intercept two girls arriving for hand-delivery to an old man from their home village. In a basement I break a man’s arm and leg, then free his pregnant daughter and pregnant granddaughters from the two rooms he has kept them locked in for years. I have grown sharper, more peremptorily violent. I rarely speak now. There is no time. We have work to do, Jane Doe and I, and it is growing so late.
The blind force in the darkness grows fiercer, angrier, more hurried. Sometimes I am not even finished when I am snatched up once again—by the back of my neck, really, like a kitten—and plopped straight into another crisis, another horror, another rescue. And I do what I do, what I am for, what Jane Doe birthed me to be: guardian, defender, invincible fighter for the weak and the injured. But it is all wearing thin; so thin that often I can see the next mission through the fabric of this one, the dawn through an increasingly transparent darkness. Wearing thin …
it happens while I am occupied in rescuing a convenience-store manager and his wife from three large men in ski masks. They are all drunk, they are all armed, and the manager has just made the mistake of hauling out the shotgun from behind the counter. All very noisy and lively; but so far no one is dead, and I have the old couple stashed safely out of the way. But the sirens are coming.
The bandits hear the sirens too, and the two who can still walk actually push past me to get out of the store. I hardly notice them, because I am starting to feel a vague, sickly unease—a psychic nausea surging up and over me in a wave of dislocation and abandonment. Outside, I double over against a wall, gasping, struggling for breath, unable to stand straight, with the patrol cars sounding in the next street over. Somehow I stumble to safety, out of sight behind a couple of huge garbage trucks, and lean there until the spasm passes. No—until it eases a bit. Whatever it is, it is not passing.
The sun is just clear of the horizon. I can feel the dark clutching blindly and feebly at me, but it hasn’t the strength to carry me away. I am on my own. I look around to get my bearings; then push myself away from the garbage trucks and start wobbling off.
A car horn close beside me, almost in my ear. I sense who it is before I turn my head and see the blue-and-white police car. He is alone, glaring at me as he pulls to the curb. “Get in, superhero,” he calls. “Don’t make me chase you.”
I am too weak, too weary for flight. I open the front passenger door and sit down beside him. He raises his eyebrows. “Usually we keep the escape artists in the back, with no door handles. What the hell.” He does not start up again, but eyes me curiously, fingertips lightly drumming on the steering wheel. He says, “You look terrible. You look really sick.” I do not answer. “You going to throw up in my car?”
I mumble, “No. I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Because we’ve had nothing but pukers for the last week—I mean, nothing but pukers. So I’d really appreciate it, you know … ” He does not finish the sentence, but keeps eyeing me warily. “Boy, you look bad. You think you ate a bad clam or something?” Abruptly he makes up his mind. “Look, before we go anywhere, I’m taking you to the hospital. Put your seat belt on.”
I leave the belt catch not quite clicked, but as he pulls away into traffic an alarm goes off. He reaches over, snaps the catch into place. I am too slow to prevent him. The alarm stops. With a quick glance my way he says, “You don’t look crazy or anything—you look like a nice, normal girl. How’d you get into the hero business?”
I am actually dizzy and sweating, as though I were going to throw up. I say again, “I don’t know. I try to help, that is all.”
“Uh-huh. Real commendable. I mean, pulling whole families out of the river and all, the mayor gives you medals for that stuff. Rescuing abused children, taking down mall shooters—that’s our job, you’re kind of making us look bad.” He slaps the steering wheel, trying to look sterner than his nature. “But beating up the bad guys, that’s a no-no. Doesn’t matter how bad they are, you get into some really deep shit doing that. They sue. And somebody like me has to go and arrest you … not to mention explaining about sixteen million times to my boss, and his boss, why I didn’t do it already, you being right there on the scene and all. All the damn time.”
My head is swimming so badly I have trouble making sense of his words. Something very bad is happening; whether to me or to Jane Doe I cannot tell. Could this hospital he is taking me to be her hospital? The policeman is speaking again, his face and voice serious, even anxious. He says, far away, “That vanishing act of yours, now that worries me. Because if you’re not crazy, then either you really are some kind of superhero, or I’m crazy. And I just don’t want to be crazy, you know?”
In the midst of my faintness, I feel strangely sorry for him. I manage to reply, “Perhaps there is another choice … another possibility … ” Even if it is the right hospital, if the darkness does not come again, I will never reach Jane Doe’s silent room—not in handcuffs, which are surely coming, and with his hand tight on my shoulder. What must I do?
“Another possibility?” His eyebrows shoot up again. “Well, now you’ve got me trying to figure what the hell that could be.”
I do not answer him.
He parks the patrol car in front of a squat gray-white building. I can see other cars coming and going: people on crutches, people being pushed in wheelchairs—an ambulance out front, another in the parking lot. He cuts the engine, turns to look straight at me. “Look, doesn’t matter whether I want to bust you on a filing cabinet full of assault charges or not. I got to do that. But what I’d way rather do is just talk to you, first, because that other possibility … that other possibility is I’ve got reality wrong, flat wrong. All of it. And I don’t think I’m ready to know that, you understand?”
It is Jane Doe’s hospital. I can feel her there. This close, the pull of the darkness is still erratic but convulsive
ly stronger. I know she is reaching for me.
With one hand I reach for the door handle, very slowly, holding his glance. With the other I start to unbuckle the seat belt.
“Don’t—”
I start to say, “I never had your choice.” But I don’t finish, any more than I get a chance to throw the door open and bolt into the hospital. Between one word and the next the darkness takes hold of me, neck and heels, and I am gone …
once again in Jane Doe’s room, standing at the foot of her bed.
And Felicia has seen me appear.
Her silence is part of the silence of the room; her breath comes as roughly as her patients’ through the tubes in their throats; the speechless fear in her wide dark eyes renders me just as mute. All I can do for her is to move aside, leaving a clear path to the door. I croak her name as she stumbles through, but the only response is the soft click as she closes the door and locks it from outside. I think I hear her crying, but I could be wrong.
There is a little bathroom, just to the right of the door, with a toilet and sink for visitors. I walk in and wash my face—still dirty and bruised from my convenience store battle—for the first time. Then I take a moment to study the mask that Jane Doe made for me. The woman in the mirror has black hair, like hers, but longer—almost to the shoulders—and fuller. The eyes looking back at me are dark gray. The skin around them is a smooth light-olive. It is blankly calm, this face, the features regular yet somehow uninteresting: easily ignored, passed over, missed in a crowd. And why not, since that so clearly suited Jane Doe’s purpose? Whatever terrified instinct first clothed me in flesh chose well.
It is a good face. A useful face. I wonder if I will ever see it again.
I walk back to Jane Doe’s bed. The strange near-nausea has not left me—if anything, it seems to rise and fall with Jane Doe’s breathing, which is labored now. She moves jerkily beneath the cover of her sheets, eyes still closed, her face sweaty and white. Some of the noises coming from the machines attached to her are strong and regular, but others chirp with staccato alarm: whether she is conscious or not, the machines say her body is in pain. And in the same way I know so many things now, I know why. The gift unleashed by the damage she suffered—the talent to give me life from nothingness, to sense danger, fear, cruelty from afar and send her own unlikely angel flying to help—has become too great for the form containing it.
I sit down by her, taking her heavy, limp hand between my own, and the darkness touches me.
There are too many.
My lips feel too cold to move, so I do not even try to speak. All I can do is look.
There are too many, and she cannot do enough.
Images comes to me, falling through my mind like leaves.
Red.
Wet red.
My feet in the red.
She made me up to save her, but I was too late. So we saved others, she and I. We saved so many others.
I look at the door. With every small sound I expect clamor and warning—gunshots, even, or barking dogs. I wonder whether Felicia will be back with the nice young policeman. I wish I could have explained to him.
There is warmth in the darkness. I feel it in my head, I feel it on my skin. It is pain … but something beyond pain, too.
On the wall next to the telephone there is a white board with words written on it, and a capped marker. Writing is new to me—I have never had to do it before—so it does not go as quickly or as well as I would like, but I manage. In a child’s block letters I write down the name I found in the darkness, and three more words: WE THANK YOU.
Then I go back to her bed.
Voices in the hall now—Felicia, and another woman, and two or three men. I cannot tell whether the young policeman is one of them. No sound yet of Felicia’s key in the lock; are they afraid of a woman who comes and goes by magic arts?
I think I would have liked to have a name of my own, but no matter. I lean forward and remove the cables, then the tubes. So many of them. Some of the machines go silent, but others howl.
Fumbling at the lock … now the sound of the key. It is so easy to close my hands around her throat, and I feel her breath between my fingers.
GRANDMA
CAROL EMSHWILLER
Grandma used to be a woman of action. She wore tights. She had big boobs, but a teeny-weeny bra. Her waist used to be twenty-four inches. Before she got so hunched over she could do way more than a hundred of everything, pushups, situps, chinning … She had naturally curly hair. Now it’s dry and fine and she’s a little bit bald. She wears a babushka all the time and never takes her teeth out when I’m around or lets me see where she keeps them, though of course I know. She won’t say how old she is. She says the books about her are all wrong, but, she says, that’s her own fault. For a long while she lied about her age and other things, too.
She used to be on every search and rescue team all across these mountains. I think she might still be able to rescue people. Small ones. Her set of weights is in the basement. She has a punching bag. She used to kick it, too, but I don’t know if she can still do that. I hear her thumping and grunting around donw there—even now when she needs a cane for walking. And talk about getting up off the couch!
I go down to that gym myself sometimes and try to lift those weights. I punch at her punching bag. (I can’t reach it except by standing on a box. When I try to kick it, I always fall over.) Back in the olden days Grandma wasn’t as shy as she is now. How could she be and do all she did? But now she doesn’t want to be a bother. She says she never wanted to be a bother, just help out is all.
She doesn’t expect any of us to follow in her footsteps. She used to, but not anymore. We’re a big disappointment. She doesn’t say so, but we have to be. By now she’s given up on all of us. Everybody has.
It started … we started with the idea of selective breeding. Everybody wanted more like Grandma: Strong, fast-thinking, fast-acting, and with the desire … that’s the most important thing … a desire for her kind of life, a life of several hours in the gym every single day. Grandma loved it. She says (and says and says), “I’d turn on some banjo music and make it all into a dance.”
Back when Grandma was young, offspring weren’t even thought of, since who was there around good enough for her to marry? Besides, everybody thought she’d last forever. How could somebody like her get old? Is what they thought.
She had three … “husbands” they called them (donors, more like it), first a triathlon champion, then a prize fighter, then a ballet dancer.
There’s this old wives’ tale of skipping generations, so, after nothing good happened with her children, Grandma (and everybody else) thought, surely it would be us grandchildren. But we’re a motley crew. Nobody pays any attention to us anymore.
I’m the runt. I’m small for my age, my foot turns in, my teeth stick out, I have a lazy eye … There’s lots of work to be done on me. Grandma’s paying for all of it though she knows I’ll never amount to much of anything. I wear a dozen different kinds of braces, teeth, feet, a patch over my good eye. My grandfather, the ballet dancer!
Sometimes I wonder why Grandma does all this for me, a puny, limping, limp-haired girl. What I think is, I’m her real baby at last. They didn’t let her have any time off to look after her own children—not ever until now, when she’s too old for rescuing people. She not only was on all the search and rescue teams, she was a dozen search and rescue teams all by herself, and often she had to rescue the search and rescue teams.
Not only that, she also rescued animals. She always said the planet would die without its creatures. You’d see her leaping over mountains with a deer under each arm. She moved bears from camp-grounds to where they wouldn’t cause trouble. You’d see her with handfuls of rattlesnakes gathered from golf courses and carports, flying them off to places where people would be safe from them and they’d be safe from people.
She even tried to rescue the climate, pulling and pushing at the clouds. Holding back fl
oods. Re-raveling the ozone. She carried huge sacks of water to the trees of one great dying forest. In the long run there was only failure. Even after all those rescues, always only failure. The bears came back. The rattlesnakes came back.
Grandma gets to thinking all her good deeds went wrong. Lots of times she had to let go and save … maybe five babies and drop three. I mean even Grandma only had two arms. She expected more of herself. I always say, “You did save lots of people. You kept that forest alive ten years longer than expected. And me. I’m saved.” That always makes her laugh, and I am saved. She says, “I guess my one good eye can see well enough to look after you, you rapscallion.”
She took me in after my parents died. (She couldn’t save them. There are some things you just can’t do anything about no matter who you are, like drunken drivers. Besides, you can’t be everywhere.) When she took me to care for, she was already feeble. We needed each other. She’s never be able to get along without me. I’m the saver of the saver.
How did we end up this way, way out here in the country with me her only helper? Did she scare everybody else off with her neediness? Or maybe people couldn’t stand to see how far down she’s come from what she used to be. And I suppose she had gotten difficult, but I’m used to her. I hardly notice. But she’s so busy trying not to be a bother, she’s a bother. I have to read her mind. When she holds her arms around herself, I get her old red sweatshirt with her emblem on the front. When she says, “Oh dear,” I get her a cup of green tea. When she’s on the couch and struggles and leans forward on her cane, trembling, I pull her up. She likes quiet. She likes for me to sit by her, lean against her, and listen to the birds along with her. Or listen to her stories. We don’t have a radio or TV set. They conked out a long time ago, and no one thought to get us new ones, but we don’t need them. We never wanted them in the first place.
Grandma sits me down beside her, the lettuce planted, the mulberries picked, sometimes a mulberry pie already made (I helped), and we just sit. “I had a grandma,” she’ll say, “though I know, to look at me, it doesn’t seem like I could have. I’m older than more grandmas ever get to be, but we all had grandmas, even me. Picture that: Every single person in the world with a grandma.” Then she giggles. She still has her girlish giggle. She says, “Mother didn’t know what to make of me. I was opening her jars for her before I was three years old. Mother … Even that was a long time ago.
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