Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  When they are gone, he approaches the place where they had stood. He looks down toward the stream. And he sees, as he expected, as he hoped he would not, the children.

  In the spilled arc light, he can just make them out: May and a boy about her age. They are absorbed in looking at the great blue-white icicles that are hanging over the entrance to the culvert. They have noticed nothing.

  May looks around when she hears his footsteps coming down the bank. Her eyes are wide in the dimming light. Karl grabs her by the hand, yanks her around to face him.

  “Don’t you ever, ever run off like that again,” he says. He takes both children by the hand and marches them up the bank and back across the snowfield to where they sleep.

  Leigh sends the boy, Ken Ozu, back to his family and puts May to bed early as punishment. She cries herself to sleep and they sit there listening to her cry, talking in whispers.

  “Where did she go?” Leigh asks.

  “She was looking at the icicles.” Karl sees again the children at the culvert mouth, the guards. He takes a breath and when he lets it out, it is a sob.

  Leigh looks at him.

  “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  For a moment he considers telling her. But what good would that do? Later, he thinks, later, when they are no longer in the camp, when they are somewhere far away.

  “I’m fine,” he says. “Just tired. Just . . .” He does not know what to say next.

  She looks at him like she doesn’t quite believe him.

  “Well, let’s go to bed,” she says. And so they do.

  In the end, he does not tell her. In fact, he tells no one until many decades later when a PhD student from Berkeley called Julie Chen asks him for an interview. Leigh is four years dead by then, from cancer, and the young woman seems friendly, earnest. She reminds him of May when she was a student, before she moved to Michigan and started her own family. He is not sure why, finally, he decides to speak of what he saw, but once he starts it feels like he’s been waiting all this time to tell it.

  • • •

  When he’s finished, Julie Chen sits silent.

  “You never told anyone this before?” she asks at last. Karl shakes his head.

  “I never told.”

  “Why not?”

  “I was afraid. Until then I did not know that people could do that, make a joke of killing. I mean, I’d read about such things in the newspaper. But I must not have believed them. I think this is what I learned at that time. People are capable of any bad thing.”

  “Yes,” Julie says. “I think I understand.”

  Karl looks at her: her lineless face, her beautiful, well-made clothes. She has grown up in a time of nervous plenty. No, in spite of what she says, she doesn’t really know what he is saying. He could try to tell her this, but it wouldn’t do any good. Instead, he should just pray that she never learns to perceive her own unknowing.

  “And what about the questionnaire?” Julie asks. “What did you decide to answer in the end?”

  For a moment Karl, whose mind wanders off quite easily these days, hesitates.

  “The . . . what?” he asks.

  “The questionnaire. Did you answer yes or no to the last two questions?”

  “Oh,” he says, “I answered yes and yes. Then I applied to work outside the camp so I could take my family away from there. We lived in Iowa for a while.”

  “What about the young men who answered no and no because of you? What happened to them?”

  “They were sent to Tule Lake or other places like that.”

  “You must feel pretty bad about that . . .” Julie Chen says. “You encouraged them but they were the ones who got in trouble.”

  “No,” Karl says. “I don’t feel bad. You see, I answered yes and yes and I was allowed to leave the camp. But the young men, the ones that had no wives or children yet, it was different for them. The ones who answered yes and yes, they were conscripted to the army. They were sent to Europe to fight. They were given very dangerous missions. Many of them were killed. But the no-no boys, as they were called: they had a hard time but at least they did not die.”

  “So something good came of it,” Julie Chen says. Then she realizes how foolish this sounds. “I didn’t mean . . .” she says. “I’m sorry.”

  Karl shrugs. He watches her as she makes her notes. Inside him, he can feel a swirl of white and cold begin, and hear the lowing sound of wind, even though the day outside is bright and still. Here are the pools of arc light; the gray hunch of mountains to the east. He’s carried them around with him all this time. He can see again the man drawing his gun, aiming it. There is nothing he can do to stop it.

  Guided Meditation

  First, before we begin, find a comfortable position. You can be sitting in a chair or lying down on the floor or on a bed. You can be on your side or on your back or on your stomach. Whatever is right for you. Whatever you prefer.

  Once you find your position, let your head rest easily and let your hands fall open. Allow your arms and legs to relax so that you can feel how they are supported by the surface beneath you. Release the muscles in your shoulders, your neck, your back. Relax your forehead. Let your breathing slow.

  Is all this clear? Remember: this is about finding the pose that is right for your body. As long as you are comfortable, you can even stand up if you want. At least, I suppose you could, I don’t see why not, although that would be kind of unusual. I don’t want you to worry about it too much, and I certainly don’t mean to imply that something as trivial as the position in which you decide to sit or lie will affect your ability to get the full range of benefits meditation can provide. That isn’t how it works. I mean, do you really think that if there was someone who couldn’t lie down or sit in a chair because of a disability, that he or she couldn’t access his or her deeper states of consciousness? I think you should probably examine the prejudices that underlie that assumption as soon as you are finished meditating.

  So whatever you would like: sit, stand, lie down. I suppose you could stand on your head if you wanted, although why you’d want to do that, I’m not sure. Once, I taught a guided meditation class at a local community center and there was a man who came every week, a young man with piercings and tattoos in Celtic-looking patterns all over his torso that you could see because he never wore a shirt in class, and who always arrived carrying the same courier bag covered with the logos of punk bands from the 1980s, bands that he could not possibly have been old enough to see live or even to have bought their music while they were still recording. Each week, while he was sitting on his mat waiting for the class to start, he would be smiling smugly to himself like he had discovered the secret stash of endorphins at the heart of existence, and then when class began and I would say that part about finding whatever position suits you best, he would—this is really true—flip up into a shoulder stand and stay like that the entire time.

  Can you imagine how distracting that was for the other students? For me? I mean, he could not have found a better way to call attention to himself if he’d stood at the center of the room screaming “Look at me!” over and over. At least if he’d screamed, I could have asked him to leave but as it was I couldn’t really say anything because, after all, I had just told everyone that they were free to take any posture they wanted and I didn’t want to seem to have suddenly turned judgmental and hypocritical.

  Every week, when time for class rolled around again, I’d hope that maybe he wouldn’t come, but he always did, regular as clockwork. Eventually, he started to unnerve the other students so much that the numbers in the class dropped drastically and the community center canceled it and filled that timeslot with Jazzercise instead. I lost my job, which was really terrible for a while, although I’m over it now that I’ve started making these recordings. All because of Mr. Shoulder Stand. Wherever he is now, I hope that one day he’s doing a shoulder stand and his neck gets stuck so his head is permanently frozen at a 30-degree angle to his shoulders a
nd for the rest of his life he has to walk around looking at his own belly button. That would serve him right.

  Anyway, once you are in your comfortable position, whatever it might be, close your eyes. Relax your eyelids. Feel your tension ebb away. Feel it draining down, as if it was water being let out of a sink, slowly spiraling toward the drain until it is gone. If you don’t feel the tension draining out of you, you really need to try a bit harder to relax. And don’t tell me that you don’t have very much tension to get rid of, because obviously you do. Otherwise why would you be doing this meditation? If you were just fine, if you had no stress or problems, you’d be out doing something more productive with your time, like brushing up on your Spanish or finally learning how to ballroom dance or volunteering to help the hungry or the homeless or some other group of needy citizens in your community. Or you might be reading one of those books that you still haven’t read even though it has been on your list of must-reads for years now, like War and Peace. But instead you are here lying or sitting or squatting or whatever because at some point you felt bad enough and tense enough to buy this recording.

  I don’t claim to know what your particular problem is, of course. Maybe you have trouble getting to sleep. Or else you have trouble staying asleep through the night. You wake up in the early morning hours, in those dead-still hours before dawn when even the stray cats are silent, and you find your heart racing and your stomach doing flips inside you, and you are certain that there is some all-important thing that you forgot to do the day before and, though now you can’t remember what it was, you’re just as certain that your failure to do this forgotten, all-important thing will alter your life forever, irremediably, for the worse, and you lie in the dark with your heart flailing in your chest like a drowning person until finally after what seems like years dawn comes seeping underneath your blinds in a sad flood.

  Or maybe that isn’t it at all. Maybe, instead of being anxious, you’re depressed. Maybe each day you drag yourself from bed feeling like someone has been scraping out the inside of your skull with a spoon the way that people scrape the rinds of their breakfast grapefruits. Maybe, as you move robotically through the hollow morning rituals of making coffee, showering, brushing your teeth, going to work, you feel like all you want is to crawl back into bed to hide. Maybe your bones feel like they are made of lead. Maybe you drink every afternoon at five to try to relieve the tightness in your throat that feels like a hand clamped around it, squeezing and squeezing without stint.

  Maybe you felt some or all of these things when you picked out this recording in the bookstore or clicked to purchase it online. I don’t know what made you so desperate for the calm and insight meditation brings that you decided to make that purchase. I would never claim to know that. I’m not you.

  But, whatever it was, this is really, really not the time to be thinking about those things. How do you expect to be able to enter into a state of mind to gain perspective on your life when you are so wrapped up in thinking about how bad you feel? You really have to let it go, at least temporarily, if you want to move forward on this spiritual journey. Do you really think that your problems are going to go anywhere if you stop paying attention to them for a while? I can tell you from experience: they will not. They will still be waiting for you when you open your eyes. So, for god’s sake, let it go for just a little while.

  I mean, think about me for a second. I have put a lot of effort into making this recording, developing this whole experience for you and you can’t even be bothered to pay attention to it for the time it takes to complete it. In all seriousness, show me the respect of trying to follow my instructions. Or if you can’t do that, at least pretend, so that I don’t have to feel any worse than I already do. That shouldn’t be so much to ask.

  Okay. Now you are relaxed. All your tension has melted away. You feel like you are floating, your body light and soft, your mind relaxed but sharp and alert.

  I want you to imagine that you are walking along a corridor. Any corridor in any kind of building will do, although it’s probably better if it isn’t one of those institutional corridors, the kind you find in high schools or underfunded public colleges, with linoleum tiles on the floor that alternate between cheese-color and pigeon-color and no windows and the cinderblock walls that look like someone chose their shade because the paint company had it on sale back in 1973 last time they decorated. I have spent quite a lot of time in corridors like that, and I’m telling you that some other kind of corridor will work better for this exercise. Like a corridor in an expensive hotel or a grand, old, Ivy League library or an exclusive Asian-style spa—someplace more reminiscent of wealth, comfort and attention to interior design.

  Hospital corridors are not great for this either, for obvious reasons. Although of course, as always, it is up to you.

  Walk down the corridor. At the end of the corridor is a set of elevator doors. Press the button to call the elevator. Naturally, the elevator doors will be part of your imaginary corridor, so if you failed to take my previous advice and you pictured a corridor in a DSS office or a halfway house, the door might have a dent or a curved black scuff mark where someone kicked it in frustration some time ago and no one has yet come to repair the damage. There might be graffiti on the door written in marker pen or scratched into the paint at just about eye level so that you more or less have to look at it while you wait. Maybe this graffiti is telling you the names of two people who plan to be 2gether 4ever. Or maybe it is someone’s name scrawled in some stylish but unintelligible way. Or maybe it is obscene: pictures of human body parts or indictments of someone’s virtue or fidelity or sexual prowess.

  If you haven’t pressed the button to call the elevator, you should hurry up and do so. The rest of us don’t want to wait while you hang around looking at the drawing of breasts on the door of your imaginary elevator.

  The elevator arrives and the doors open. You step inside. The elevator should be empty. I hope, for your sake, it is. If there is someone in the elevator, you might want to think seriously about not getting inside because that is not part of this meditation. I can’t tell you who this person in the elevator is or what they are doing there. This is not my imaginary elevator, it is yours.

  Perhaps the person in the elevator is someone you knew a long time ago and are pleased to see. Like a childhood friend or an older relative whom you’ve missed very badly since her death. Or it could be someone you don’t really care whether you see or not, your fifth grade math teacher or your mother’s hairdresser. If it is one of those people, you can probably go ahead and get inside the elevator without fear.

  But then again, perhaps it is a complete stranger, someone who doesn’t seem quite right when you look at him. Maybe he’s shaped strangely, as if his limbs had been stapled to one another after they were manufactured separately rather than growing altogether the way normal people do. When he moves, it might be in a disjointed, marionette way, one muscle at a time, so when he turns to look at you, he moves only his head, not his neck or body. You see his face in the dim, watery light of the single bulb stuck in the low ceiling and it looks like a cloth bag full of flour, white and ponderous; his eyes are nearly swallowed up by it. He is tall and broad and he is wearing an old leather jacket that is too small for him and that looks like he found it in the trash. His white T-shirt and jeans are covered with the dark blotches of grease stains the size of fingerprints. His hair is like the stubble after a field has burned.

  Have the elevator doors slid closed yet? If they have not, you could wait for the next car, although who knows how long that will take, or you could just get in and ignore the person standing in the corner. It could be that he won’t do anything, that he is just an unfortunately unattractive man with dirty clothes, someone who’s had a hard time for reasons that you can’t know. Your forebodings could very well be just your own shallow judgment based on his appearance. You’ll have to make up your mind and get in the elevator to find out. Whatever you decide, could you conside
r doing it soon? It is time to go on to the next part of the exercise.

  Have you stepped inside? Press the button to go down to the lowest floor. Watch the doors slide closed. Is there a man beside you in the car? Is the man watching you? Look over. Don’t be too obvious about it, because if he does turn out to be a threat of some kind, you don’t want to provoke him. The doors have just slid shut and now you are inside the elevator, trapped there until it gets to the bottom of the shaft and that could be a long time, depending on whether the elevator is fast or slow. If you imagined a corridor in a municipal government building or something like it, this is probably a slow elevator that takes whole minutes to go through each floor. I wish you had followed my advice and that you were in a Ritz-Carlton somewhere, but we’ll just have to make the best of what you’ve created here.

  It’s descending now, you can feel that wobbly, lifted feeling you always feel when you ride in elevators. There are numbers on a panel by the door and you watch the lights blink as you pass each floor. The man beside you, if there is one, makes a noise that is somewhere between a grumble and a snort. It’s possible he smells. Only you can know what the ingredients of that odor are and whether it is mild or strong, a faint whiff or a stench so powerful it starts to make your eyes water.

  Don’t blame me if that is happening. I didn’t put the man into the elevator with you, you did. In fact, I told you to imagine the elevator was empty and then warned you not to get in the elevator if it was occupied. So this is not my fault. However, although it is not my fault, I will nevertheless try to help you deal with this problem you’ve created. Don’t thank me; it’s my job.

  So, if you can, try to visualize him disappearing, winking out, the way the picture on the television used to become a white dot in the middle of the screen before it vanished. Close the eyes inside your head, the ones you are using to see the corridor and the elevator and the man, and concentrate hard. Be warned that it is easier to imagine something into being than it is to make it go away, particularly if it is something unpleasant that you don’t want to think about. Unwanted, looming things have a tendency to hang around more insistently the more you try to get rid of them. So don’t be disappointed if you open your eyes again (inside your head) and find that he’s still there.