This Is Not Your City

by Caitlin Horrocks

  The summer Mouse locked herself in a fridge, and Mr. Martin locked himself out of his own garage, over and over, the only thing I ever noticed was how Mouse had popsicles and wouldn’t share. I was angry at her and for a long time that was all I remembered about that summer. I couldn’t even tell you when she stopped having popsicles, or when Mr. Martin finally had the rotting furniture hauled away, or when I realized that I had never been able to protect her, not ever, and that whatever’s good about her life now is in spite of me just like it’s in spite of Mom and Mr. Martin and everybody else, and that if I had the opportunity to steal again for her, I’d steal big. Something better than butter, better than a dog, because I let her go away from me and into a garage again and again, and whatever I’m doing now is nothing compared to that.

  Joplin was a month ago, so the rottie’s probably dead by now, and the poodle, the terrier, the lab. I assume Perdita’s dead, too. It seems dangerous to think otherwise. If she isn’t, I should probably be wishing for her that she was, but mostly I’ve got enough on my plate without worrying about the dogs. Mouse still sends me the same dumb postcards. The Goodwill still pays six an hour. Leo’s still elbow deep in cow brains. His skin thing is getting worse. He’s got patches so bad they’re swampy with fluid, where his shirts stick and scabs won’t form. He’s always been hourly at National Beef so there’s no insurance. It’s like he’s molting into something new and horrible, and all I want to do is hold his skin closed, press the seams of him together, so he won’t fall apart and nothing in our lives will change, because I figure I am about as happy as I’m going to get the way things are. So I refuse to wish Leo nice, or the dogs free, or my sister happy, or myself forgiven, or much of anything all that much different than it’s likely to get. I just won’t wish them, and then when they all don’t happen it won’t mean a thing to me. If this is what I get in this world I’ll take it. Love and squalor, but mostly love. I’ll take it and I’ll take it and I will not be sorry.

  Embodied

  In this, my 127th life, I am employed as an internal auditor with Wells Fargo. I live in Des Moines, Iowa, in a white, threebedroom house. I have a husband named Murray, and six months ago I had a baby son named Jacob. I don’t have him anymore.

  Murray’s good with kids. He teaches the fourth grade. He’s the only man on staff at Haisley Elementary apart from the gym teacher and the janitor, so he gets fussed over. I can’t tell if he likes it or if he’s lonely. I went to the Haisley Curriculum Night with Murray this past spring, just to be supportive, look at the projects his students had been working on. They were the same ones he does every year, the self-portraits in pastels, the informational posters on native bird species, the puppets of Harriet Tubman, Matthew Henson, Martin Luther King, Jr. for Black History Month. I sat up front at Murray’s desk while he talked to the parents, telling them about the curricular goals for the fourth-grade year and the upcoming Iowa Standardized Educational Assessment Tests. I’d started showing and it made people tender with me. They offered me seats, brought me fruit punch in paper cups.

  “Mr. Rankin’s so good with the children,” they said. “He must be so excited.”

  The parents were polite to me, but distant, too, like I was breeding something on Murray’s behalf. Still, it’s always nice to see someone you care for be complimented, recognized, given plates of cookies and African violets in orange plastic pots. At home our windowsills are filled with African violets, tiny purple flowers and thick fuzzy green leaves. I kill them deliberately. If I didn’t, the whole house would fill up with them.

  “Is it your first?” the parents asked, and I nodded.

  In fact, over 127 lives I’ve been pregnant something like 200, maybe 220 times. The numbers get a little hazy. But I figured I knew what to expect. We’d decided to try for a baby, and I’d gotten pregnant quickly. The first few weeks, we were both excited. But when I was sick in the mornings, when my belly seized around itself, I could feel that something was wrong.

  There were a few kids at Curriculum Night, even though they weren’t supposed to be there. Their parents said they couldn’t find babysitters. The kids were bouncing off the walls, full of fruit punch and sugar cookies, and Murray finally made them go stand out in the hall. He didn’t let them back in until their parents were ready to leave. When he opened the door the kids shot back in, unrepentant, and knocked over three of the child-sized blue plastic chairs and a desk. “You’re sure you want one?” I asked, hand on my belly. It was early enough that I was still hoping that one of those days he might just say “no,” and we could call the whole thing off.

  “Ours will be different,” he said, locking his classroom door behind us. We headed out to the parking lot. We lived a few blocks from the school, but it was early spring and the weather was uncertain, so we’d taken my car.

  “Isn’t that what all teachers say? ‘Mine will be different?’”

  “Mine will be different.”

  “You say that now.”

  “I’m sure I’ll be different. Every kid in my class, I’ve wanted to pitch ’em out the window some day or other. You have to remind yourself that you just can’t do it, you tell yourself to care about them. I’m looking forward to having a kid that I don’t have to remind myself not to want to do some damage to.”

  “And if we end up with a hellion?”

  “We’ll love it anyway. We won’t have a choice. We’ll be parents: automatic affection.”

  Murray was right about one thing: we don’t have a choice. The heart hates who it hates.

  I don’t have a lot of experience with hatred, really. Resignation, perhaps. Reincarnation is definitely a lesson in socio-economics. I’ve been aristocracy exactly twice. The rest of the time I’ve been here shoveling shit with everyone else. This current life is, objectively, the best of my existence. It’s not that I’m comparing the life of a Certified Internal Auditor with stimulating evenings conversing in Mme. de Staël’s celebrated salon in the Marais. I’m comparing it to dying in childbirth, working someone else’s land, getting smallpox and typhoid and cholera and malaria and dengue fever. A good office job isn’t something you just throw away.

  As a side note, one of my turns among the royals was in 1296, when I was one of nine princes of Georgia, exactly 505 years before the country was annexed by Russia. All nine of us were named David Melnik, David the King. It got confusing. Coincidentally, Melnik is also the name of a town in northern Bohemia, where in a different life my family made wine. We had beautiful vineyards and a decent life, and my parents were very upset when I went off to fight with the Hussites. I wasn’t aware of this life until recently, when Lorna, from work, went there on vacation and showed her photos around the breakroom during lunch. She’d been to a church decorated entirely in bones: a bone chandelier, a bone altar, bone candelabras, and a display of skulls smashed and shot through during the Hussite wars. One of them was mine, the second from the left, on the bottom shelf. It looked dusty. I don’t know what it was that felt familiar; even I’ve never seen my own skull. I kept staring at the photograph, holding up the rotation, photos stacking up to my right and Nick and Garrison, to my left, twiddling their thumbs over a photo of Lorna’s ugly fiancé in his boxers on a hotel balcony.

  “Are you okay?” Lorna asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said, and I passed the picture on to Nick. I let go of the only evidence I’ll ever have that that yellowed, brittle hump of bone used to be me, that when the musket ball killed me with an explosive, sudden pressure, I was a young man named Vojta who would never own a vineyard, who would never sleep with a woman, who would not receive the reward he expected from the God he fought for.

  I certainly didn’t say anything there in the breakroom, not to Lorna and definitely not to Nick or Garrison. I know how it sounds. Give me credit for a sense of self-preservation. I’m an audit project leader in the central Midwestern regional office of the largest financial institution headquartered in the western U.S. I have plans at Wells Fargo. I�
��m aiming for a transfer to corporate headquarters in San Francisco within the next five years. This isn’t hoodoo spirituality; it’s just fact, squared up and solid like my Q4 internal audit of the personal banking division. We’re all trailing these lives out behind us, dragging them along like a dress train or a tail or a jet plume. I’m just one of the only ones who sees them.

  As lives go, this one’s okay. Des Moines isn’t fin-de-siècle Paris, or Old Kingdom Cairo, but there’s enough to do and growing up in Sioux Falls would make about anywhere look like someplace worth spending a few decades. Anyway, it’s not really as confusing as you’d think, being the 127th version of yourself. I remember my other lives the way I remember that I need to buy milk on the way home from work, or that I need to pay the water bill, or call my father on his birthday. They’re quiet, in the background, a little hush of white noise, like the sea in a shell. In this life, I’ve seen the sea only once, on a family vacation to Florida. I think people from dry places lack a certain respect for the ocean. I’ve known the sea as a killing thing. I’ve been a fisherman, several times. Once a whaler, once a clamdigger and once a life in which I dove for abalone. When I died I left a widow and three children, the third of whom I did not love. I don’t know what it was about him, my son who dove for abalone with me and slept across the room in our house by the sea, but I did not love him, and it shamed me that he knew.

  “Murray,” I said, a couple of weeks after Curriculum Night. He was lying on the couch, watching the History Channel. He watches a lot of educational shows looking for things he can screen in his classroom, kill forty-five minutes. We have piles of blank tapes at the ready on top of the television. I walked in front of him, sat on the coffee table. “It doesn’t feel right,” I said. “It feels strange.” I held my hands over my belly, the swell of it, still small and low between my hip bones.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just have a bad feeling,” I said. It sounded stupid, like I’d seen Rosemary’s Baby once too often, but I couldn’t think of any other way to explain it. I’ve spoken 109 different languages, and I hunted through all the bits and pieces I could remember of them. But it was like when I go back in my mind as far as I can: there’s a cave, and a lot of grunting, and I had thoughts I couldn’t think because I didn’t have the words. I didn’t have the tongue, the larynx that I needed to pronounce words in Tagalog, or Swahili, or Old Provençal, which was quite new at the time I spoke it, or English. I give English a six on an overall scale of difficulty. It is a much easier language to master than we like to think.

  Murray opened his mouth and shut it a few times, and I could tell that he was searching through the one language he’d ever learned to find the right thing to say. “When’s your next appointment with Dr. Lyons?” he asked.

  “In a week.”

  “You should tell her. You should ask her about it.” Murray was frightened but it backfired on me; he wanted so badly to believe that nothing was wrong that it made him dismissive. I wanted his pity and his panic and I wanted rescue. He wanted to wait it out until the next scheduled appointment, until the ultrasound. He said I could call my Ob/Gyn if I really wanted. But what would I tell her? That I had been pregnant hundreds of times and this was different from any of them? That I was choking on my own baby?

  If I could have told anyone, it would have been Murray. He knows about my other lives, that I remember things no one else does and that perhaps no one should. They make me tired, when I think about them too long. Bone-tired like when you feel too exhausted to sleep, only when I feel that way it’s worse because I don’t know if I’ll ever get to sleep, if we ever get to stop, or if we just go on forever. I don’t believe in nirvana. I don’t think we ever get it right. I don’t feel any wiser than I did in that cave. It scares me, what that might mean, that there might not be any stop to it, no punishment or paradise or just oblivion.

  Murray doesn’t mind that I don’t go to church with him. I think he gets extra attention from the ladies: how sad, that your wife sleeps in on Sundays, that it takes her a cup of coffee and two sections of the paper (front page and Arts and Leisure) to be civil. Murray’s an Episcopalian anyway, and if I did decide to start going to church again, it wouldn’t be to St. Andrew’s. They’re just Catholics with no pope, and I haven’t died for five separate faiths just to turn around and attend a church that only exists because some English king wanted to trade up on wives. In this life I was raised a Methodist. I didn’t mind it at the time. As a kid I was just living the one life, only aware of having eight years under my belt, not 5,000-odd. If you’re counting, that works out to an average life expectancy, over 127 lives, of about forty. When I think that I’m only ten years short of that right now, it helps put things in perspective.

  The routine ultrasound was scheduled for eighteen weeks. The baby quickened at seventeen and I flinched every time I felt it move, just a flutter, like prickles on the back of your neck except that it was inside me and it was hateful to me and there was no way to make it stop. I held a thing inside of myself that felt heavy and corrosive, that I wanted desperately to be rid of. How to say that I was hoping for a monster? For something limbless, hopeless, so damaged no one would ask me to carry it to term. It would have been a relief to find out that my dread was prescient, that it had a source and a solution. But he was fine, two arms, two legs, ten fingers, ten toes, one head with one mouth and one nose and two eyes, still fused shut. He turned out to be a he, everything where it should be. Murray was ecstatic, so relieved I almost thought he’d keel over right there in the examining room and I wanted to go to him, but I was flat on my back, my belly covered in goo and my baby pulsing there on the screen in black and white.

  He insisted we go out to dinner, to celebrate. He ordered wine for himself and then looked at me guiltily. “Go ahead,” I said. “You deserve it. I’ve been making you so nervous, all over nothing.”

  “Not nothing,” he said. “I know you’ve been feeling rotten. It’s not that I don’t think you have. It’s just such a relief. That the baby’s healthy.”

  “I know. I feel the same way,” I said, which is possibly the second biggest lie I’ve ever told him.

  Murray liked the name Jacob, and I didn’t dislike it. “Are you sure?” he asked. “You don’t seem thrilled.”

  “Jacob’s fine,” I said. The service was slow, and I felt ill and ravenous at the same time. I ate most of the bread and got crumbs all over the tablecloth. I resented being so hungry, resented that the bread I ate was being used to grow something that sapped me like a parasite.

  “It doesn’t have to be Jacob. Did you know an obnoxious Jacob? Like I couldn’t ever name my son Paul, there was this horrible kid when I was in fifth grade, he was such a bully. I’d understand.”

  There seemed to be nothing Murray was not willing to understand. It made him seem less intelligent, like he wasn’t so much making allowances for people as just not noticing what made them difficult in the first place. It’s an unfair thing, kindness making people out to be dumber than they are.

  “Jacob’s fine.”

  “Are you thinking of Jacobs from—before? From other lives?” He’s the only one who can say things like that and make them sound natural, who can even say them with a straight face. I’ve never known if he’s just humoring me or not, if he really believes me or just finds my other qualities compelling enough to make up for being delusional. I feel like it should bother me more than it does, not knowing if my husband secretly thinks I’m crazy. Maybe I don’t mind because I have secrets about him, too, such as the fact that the way in which I love him is almost the exact same way in which I loved my wife in China, in 1102. I’d passed the exams to enter government service, and I had to go see a district official, in the provincial capital, to be assigned to a post. I didn’t know where the rest of my life would take place and it frightened me. But my parents were very proud, and they helped to arrange a marriage with a girl who was solemn but pretty. We had five children, and they
looked just like somebody had taken half of me and half of her and mixed them until they balanced exactly. We enjoyed each other’s company and did not expect more than life was likely to provide. Our happiness might have been a matter of managed expectations, but it was real.

  I’ve never told Murray because I don’t want to hurt him, to imply that my love for him is recycled. Because I think maybe he really does believe me, and I don’t want to repay his trust with reconstituted love. Besides, I’m not sure he’d understand the distinction, that I don’t think he is my wife, reincarnated, just that he reminds me of her. There’s a big difference. I don’t know who he used to be; he’s a soul I’ve never encountered, and while it makes him an unknown quantity, it’s a thing to be grateful for. It’s horrible to see someone and recognize who they were before and then be unable to see who they are now, to react to them in a way that’s out of my control, that has nothing to do with this life. It’s only happened once or twice, but that was enough. I had to quit my work-study job in college because my boss turned out to be someone I’d killed. The details were fuzzy, but the guilt was sharp and overwhelming. I couldn’t see the Dining Services Supervisor who signed off on my time cards: just the soldier, the look of pain and disbelief.

  “Jacob’s fine with me,” I told Murray, that night at the restaurant, after the ultrasound. “It’s fine.”

  Murray buttered the last piece of bread and put it on the plate in front of me. “You should pick the middle name,” he said.