by J. Q. Coyle
My ribs are being pulled apart as if each is its own cage.
It’s not just that my vision and my own body feel like they’re blurred and doubling, but the room also seems to double. It’s like my entire self is splitting and dividing.
I have a flashing fear of never belonging anywhere, being insane and cut off—forever.
The pressure in my chest grows and grows until, finally, with a fiery pain that shoots through the center of my body, I feel myself tearing. I’ve never been so stricken with terror in my life. But I give in to it. I will either live or die, but I can’t fight it any more. Gasping, grasping for something to hold on to, I reach for the gun again, its cold weight in my hand.
I see two slanted bedside tables and in one of them, there’s another gun—just like the one I’m holding.
And then I see myself closing the drawer of the other desk, leaving the gun behind. My mother’s bedroom heaves farther from the one I’m standing in. I watch myself in that other bedroom, now separate from this one, arching and pulling away from me. I watch myself stagger but I don’t fall. I walk quickly out of my mother’s bedroom, back down the hall to my own.
And yet I’m still myself, standing there in my mother’s bedroom, the gun heavy in my hand. I shove it into my jacket pocket, alongside my phone and the tool.
Something’s going to happen to you, my father said. When it does, you’ll know it.
This bedroom snaps into focus as if soldered at its edges and sealing itself up.
Now this is the only room.
I’m the only person here.
There’s no pressure in my chest. It’s gone. There’s only a dull ache in the lower part of my ribs on one side of my body, more like the memory of pain than real pain.
I’m shaking but I feel relieved—like I’m on the other side of it all.
Is it possible that this is what I’ve been waiting for without knowing I was waiting for anything at all? And then I know one thing that is absolutely true: this was what my father was talking about. He said I’d know when it happened, and I do. I feel different, and even though I’ve just gone through something surreal and otherworldly, I feel stronger, more sure of myself. Actually, more myself.
Spandrel. My father told me that’s what I am. The word comes back to me now, strange and beautiful. But I still don’t know what it means.
I walk out of my mother’s bedroom into the hall.
I look into my own bedroom. It’s empty.
I run down the hall, down the stairs.
There’s my leftover cake from the party, plastic-wrapped within an inch of its life, sitting on the kitchen counter.
This is our house. There’s nothing strange about it. This is the house we’ve always lived in. For so long I’ve thought my mother and I only had each other. That was a lie.
I open the front door and close it quietly behind myself.
Breathing the cold air, I can sense the other me—the one who put the gun back and is now standing in her bedroom as if she’s real.
But she feels very real.
It’s like I know the other me is dazed, pacing slowly in her bedroom, trying to make sense of what’s just happened. She’s on the phone, probably calling Hafeez again, to see if he’s on the way.
But I’m standing here in my yard, a gun in one of my jacket pockets.
I look up at my bedroom window.
I’m not there.
I’m here, out in the cold almost-dark.
I turn to go, and there, at the end of the street, Hafeez rounds the corner, pedaling his bike toward me.
CHAPTER NINE
THE WIND is sharp and cold. My ribs feel all cinched up. Hafeez is walking his bike alongside me, and I’m trying to explain everything that just happened, but I know it’s coming out fast and jumbled. “I don’t really get any of it. I only know what I feel. And I felt the worlds rip in two. I ripped in two. The other me—I know she’s kept going.”
Hafeez only nods, trying not to interrupt. Once we’ve made it to the bus stop, I lean against the sign’s metal post.
“And what’s this other you doing now?” He still has a fat lip from taking Sprowitz’s punch, so his words come out in a mumble.
I can see my other self in my head. “She’s wearing sweatpants and a sweatshirt and she’s talking to you in her room. You came over.”
Hafeez looks at me, surprised.
She’s kind of becoming someone else in this moment, just slightly. I can feel the difference like it’s a tiny crack in the surface of a frozen lake. She made a different decision. She’s becoming the person who didn’t take the gun, who didn’t go after her father. Her choice is shaping her, not the other way around. “She’s not me anymore,” I tell Hafeez, who’s bent over, locking his bike to a parking sign. “I took the gun. She didn’t. We’re becoming different people.”
Hafeez straightens up. “What? You have…” He lowers his voice and leans toward me. “You have a gun?”
I nod.
“Jesus! Why?” Then he mutters to himself, “This is not good. This is not good!”
“I thought it would make me feel safer.”
“It doesn’t make me feel safer!” Hafeez’s eyes are wide.
The gun doesn’t make me feel any safer, either—if anything it feels risky, like it could turn on me. “I don’t even know how to shoot a gun.” I see the lights of the bus turn the corner, headed toward us. “What are we doing, Hafeez? I can’t find my father! What if this address is old and he doesn’t live there anymore?”
“Look, it’s all we have. It’s a start.”
“It’s not all we have.” I pull out the tool and show it to Hafeez.
“What is it?” he says.
“I have no idea. But I’ve seen it in that hallucination, the one with my father on the sinking cruise ship.”
“What was he doing with it?”
“I don’t know. I’d just gotten shot. It’s all a little blurry. It was in his hand, though. I know it was.”
The bus groans to a stop in front of us.
I slip the tool back into my pocket. The bus door opens but neither of us moves toward it. We’re both a little dazed.
“In or out?” the driver says. “What’ll it be?”
“In.” Hafeez nudges me toward the bus. “Definitely in.”
There are only a few passengers, bundled and hunched in their coats. Their faces are cast in a greenish hue from the dull overhead lights.
As I follow Hafeez down the aisle, I feel the gun’s heaviness in my jacket pocket. And I feel dangerous, kind of powerful and scared at the same time.
Hafeez and I slide into a seat. He asks for the tool and I hand it over.
He studies it for a few minutes and then stares at me intensely. “You trust him, right?”
I’ve never trusted my father. He couldn’t even do the simplest part of being a father: showing up. But now everything’s changed. He was there. I saw him with my own eyes. He was fatherly. “I think he was telling me the truth, or trying to.” I nod. “Yes. I trust him. I have to.” It feels foreign to trust my father, but hopeful too. “I mean, I’m hoping I might not be crazy after all.”
“And he knew the poem, too. How did it go?”
“‘I am, I am, I am.’ And then he added, You are, you are, you are.”
“Couldn’t that be about the multiverse? That there are different versions of each of you?”
My father said that he kept one version of himself hidden—the good one.… “I guess so.”
He hands me the tool and pulls out his phone. “‘Spandrel,’ that’s the word your father used, right?”
“Right.”
He clicks around and then says, “Okay. There’s an architectural definition of spandrel. It’s like the leftover space in a building. For example, the triangular curved area between arches or the space under a set of stairs. The by-products.” He opens a few more searches. “Here’s a definition in poetry. Some guy named Giampietro invented a ki
nd of poem called a spandrel that uses leftover pieces cut from poems to make new poems.”
“Did Plath write spandrels?” I wonder aloud.
“Probably not. She was dead before Giampietro was born.” He keeps clicking. “Wait. What’s this?”
I lean toward his phone.
“This one’s the gold mine. Looks like Stephen J. Gould and some guy named Lewontin applied the term to evolutionary biology. According to Wikipedia Gould and Lewontin believe that a spandrel is ‘any biological feature of an organism that arises as a necessary side consequence of other features, which is not directly selected for by natural selection.’ Again, the by-products.”
I shake my head. “And that’s a gold mine because…”
Hafeez folds his arms on his chest, and, in a professorial way, he taps his chin. “Is this weird thing that’s happening to you genetic or something? If language is a by-product of evolution, this weirdness could be, too. Maybe a bunch of people are out there going through this. It could have been handed down from your father.”
“I’ve inherited the ability to move through universes?”
“Tell me what happened. Start at the beginning.”
I replay the whole scene at the party for him, slower and calmer this time. I start with the shock of seeing my father and I try to remember everything he said about worlds and versions of yourself. And I tell Hafeez about the world my father wanted me to go into, the one that’s dying. “He talked about this kid named Jax, and how he wanted me to help get Jax out of that world. And I know who Jax is. I’ve seen him. And he wanted me to tell Jax’s mother to go get the atlas, if the world was going to die, that he probably wouldn’t be able to help. But I can’t tell her.” I don’t mention to Hafeez that I can’t stop thinking about Jax. I’m not ready to say it out loud, and part of me knows it might hurt Hafeez.
“Jax’s mother is dead. And my father told me I can’t trust Alex and that he never stole from him, but Alex thinks he did.” And then I describe my parents together, seeing them like that for the first time, the way they looked at each other. And how it all fell apart—Alex’s research assistants dragging my father away.
“And then there’s Jane.” I go back over the conversation I overheard in her office and how she left the party as soon as she could. “‘I’m sorry this had to happen.’ She said it like she knew something was going to happen and the problem was bad timing.”
Hafeez is staring out the window, watching the city glide by, but I know he’s listening.
“All this time she and Alex have been upping my meds,” I tell him, “when maybe all I needed was whatever happened to me in my mother’s room.”
“What was it like?” he asks.
“It was like being torn in half, of being two people, not just one, but I’m glad it happened. Did you see how I got on the bus? No hesitation, no freak-out. The panic over every small decision—it’s gone.” I got over something when I took the gun—and at the same time put it back and went to my bedroom. I see my other self, again, back at home—an image as vivid as any of my hallucinations. She’s lying on her back, the pieces of her notebook all torn up around her. She’s given up and she’s scared too. I tell Hafeez about it. “Why am I still seeing this other version of myself?”
“When we went back to Pakistan one summer for a month,” Hafeez says, “my mother kept saying, ‘This is the life we left behind. This is what I would have been doing. This is where we would have been living.’ It was like she was seeing an alternate universe. Maybe she was seeing some version of a universe that was real in some way.”
We switch over to the T, taking the line that goes toward Forest Hills. He asks me about the poem with the lines “I am, I am, I am.” “What’s the title?”
“‘Suicide off Egg Rock.’”
“That’s grim.”
“Well, you know how Plath died, right?”
He nods.
“There is no line ‘You are, you are, you are.’”
“What’s the poem about?”
“It’s a little blurry. It’s more a feeling of complete desperation.”
He searches the poem on his phone, and we start to skim it together.
And then we both stop reading at the same line. “It’s about a tattoo, how the blood beats it,” I say.
“Your dad’s tattoo,” Hafeez says. “Do you think he’s trying to make a point?”
I shrug. “He didn’t have much time. He had so much to say that it was all compressed.” I rub my temples. “Like the cracked world, the one I’m supposed to go into and save Jax and maybe some atlas he was worried about too? I don’t even really know Jax.” I sigh. “Are we getting anywhere?”
“Well, only literally. I mean, we’re here,” Hafeez says.
And we are—the second to last stop at Green Street in Jamaica Plain.
We shuffle off the train, back out into the ripping cold.
There’s a Bikes Not Bombs bike shop, a ball field dusted with snow. I pull the envelope out of my jacket pocket, and Hafeez looks up the address.
As we head down Seaverns toward Centre Street, I say, “Do you think my father was trying to talk to me through a Plath poem? Who does that?”
“My father would have left me a complex chemistry equation.”
“But, Hafeez, I’m not just crazier than ever, am I? I mean, I’m not falling into some deeper well of my father’s craziness. You’d tell me if you thought I’d lost it, wouldn’t you?”
He nods. “I would. I think I have in the past, right?”
“True.”
I stop walking. I’m struck by a memory—or at least that’s how it feels: my father helping me start up a handmade go-cart on a boardwalk in winter. At first the engine revved, then stalled, revved and stalled again. But finally he got it going, and as I zipped down the windy boardwalk, gray clouds were passing quickly across the sky, and my father was jumping and laughing and cheering.
“What’s wrong?” Hafeez asks.
“Nothing.” I’m not sure what to say—I’m having a memory of something I’ve never remembered before? And it’s such a simple, little, sweet scene. Did it happen?
At the Purple Cactus, we take a left on Centre, and, after a few blocks, we come to South Street. My face has tightened up from the cold. My toes are numb.
“Is there a universe where Hitler made it as an artist instead of a dictator?” I ask.
“Is there one where Abe Lincoln couldn’t pull it off? Where the states are all chopped up like Europe?”
“And Gandhi,” I say. “He couldn’t have prevailed in most universes. I mean, the decks were stacked against him.”
“I wonder if there’s a version of myself who can ask a girl out, you know?” Hafeez says, stuffing his hands into his jacket pockets.
“I wonder if there’s a version of me where I have my shit together,” I say.
The wind is so sharp, it stings my face.
“The other you?” Hafeez asks. “Can you tell what she’s doing now? Is she still freaking out?”
I stop walking and think about it for a minute. “She’s talking to you,” I say. “I guess both versions of me rely on you. By the way, thank you for taking that punch.”
“That’s okay. I’d do it again.”
“I hope you don’t have to.”
It’s quiet for a minute or two, and then I say, “For the first time in a long time, I’m moving toward something, Hafeez.”
He looks at me and smiles in that bemused way of his. “Me too.”
CHAPTER TEN
MY FATHER’S apartment building is a shit-hole. The lobby is small and dirty. Empty milk cartons are flattened in one corner. Take-out fliers litter the ground near the wall of mailboxes. There’s a small desk, as if there used to be a doorman. But no one’s around. No security either. No way to buzz anyone up.
I’m embarrassed by it and I feel guilty for being embarrassed. He’s my father. He isn’t rich. So what?
“Are you sure this is
it?” Hafeez says. Maybe he wants to turn back. Part of me would like to.
“I’m sure.”
We walk to the elevators and push the up arrow.
“I hope they regularly inspect these things,” Hafeez says. “It’s a state law, right?”
Once inside the elevator, Hafeez immediately checks the little placard with the last inspection date. Before the doors shut, I put my arm out and say, “Let’s take the stairs.”
The stairs have their own stench, the sickly sweet smell of rot. We jog up them fast and open the door to a long hallway, lit by a single bulb. My father’s apartment is 3F, at the end.
“What if they roughed him up and dropped him off?” I say. “What if he’s here?”
“That would be weird,” Hafeez says. “Why not try to stay in touch with you? Why not just give you a phone number?”
I stop a few feet from his door. “Was Alex going to try to talk him into some kind of rehab? This is the kind of place where an addict would live. Isn’t it?”
“God, I hope we’re not tracking down a meth head.”
I whip around. “You said you’d tell me if you thought I was crazy.”
“Yeah, but who’s going to tell me if I’m crazy, too?”
“Shit.”
I close my eyes. I try to remember the moment when my father hugged me and I knew he was speaking the truth. I try to hold on to that now.
I raise my knuckles to the door, take a breath. For a second, I wonder if my father has another wife, another daughter, an entire other life, all on the other side of this door. I steel myself and knock.
“Nice decision-making,” Hafeez whispers. “Sans freak-out.”
“Nice use of random French.”
He’s right. No panic, no feeling of my chest ripping in half.
We wait.
Nothing.
I knock again.
No voices, no footsteps. No other family. In fact, no one.
“Try the knob,” Hafeez says.
“You try it.”
He reaches forward, twists the knob, and we’re both expecting it to be locked, but it isn’t. The door swings open. The weak hallway light spills a yellow rectangle around my shadow.
