Broken river, p.26
Broken River, page 26
“What?” Joe said amid the sounds of crashing metal and splintering wood. Didn’t he understand that the plants were the valuable thing here? If there was money, it was probably in a safe upstairs. And there was no time for that.
“We gotta go, man. You killed a guy. They heard it upstairs.”
This got Joe’s attention. He emerged from the wreckage, backlit by the artificial daylight. He looked like an avenging angel, a fat one, an evil one. Louis could sort of make out his facial expression, and it was one of annoyance.
“We killed a guy,” Louis corrected, and Jesus fuck, it was actually true, he was again accessory to madness, and they were both going to go to jail very soon. “We gotta go.”
The commotion upstairs finally seemed to register on Joe’s consciousness. He grunted. Started glancing around the room for an alternate way out, but there wasn’t one. It was back upstairs or nothing.
The secret door crashed open. It sounded exactly like a hundred cans and jars rattling in unison. Louis jumped to his feet.
“Pick it up,” Joe said, pointing. He was pointing to Daniel—to his gun, which was still tangled up with his dead hand, a finger hooked through the trigger guard. The gun, the hand, the whole forearm, were lying in the pool of now-congealing, blackening blood.
Louis scrambled down the stairs, lunged for the gun, grabbed it. In the process he made brief contact with the dead hand and was nauseated. His foot unstuck from the blood puddle with a wet crackle, as though from a movie theater floor. The gun was bloody, and now his hand was bloody. The stuff was viscous, sticky, an awful syrup.
He turned to the stairs in time to watch the goth chick, lady of the house, gallop halfway down, stop, take it all in. She screamed with her whole body, really digging into it, like an opera singer.
“Lady, please,” Louis started to say when she paused between breaths, but then Joe stepped up and shot her, too, right in the chest. The shot was loud, so fucking loud; it filled the space like a new, toxic kind of light. She sat down, hard. Her mouth seemed to be saying ohgodohgodohgod but Louis couldn’t hear anything. A second tone had been added to the ringing in his ears; it was a chord now, persistent and bothersome, as if somewhere in his head a cat was standing on the keys of a church organ.
But he heard Joe when he said “C’mon,” grumpily, and walked past Louis and onto the stairs. He stomped past the dying woman, who didn’t even look up at him. She was just staring into space, blinking, with her hand pointlessly clutching the wound. Upstairs, Joe was greeted by screams. “Everybody shut the fuck up and back off!” he shouted, and in response a stampede of feet rumbled across the basement ceiling.
Louis briefly entertained the notion of putting the gun in his mouth and ending it all right now. But he couldn’t imagine letting this bloody object anywhere near his face. Funny, that—he’d be dead in seconds, who gave a shit what was in his mouth? But no, it was already bad enough the stuff was on his hand and shoe—and now, somehow, on his coat and pants.
Upstairs, the screen door slammed. Bus was leaving. Louis made a run for it, taking the steps two at a time, but something tripped him up, and he went down, breaking his fall with his unarmed arm. It fucking hurt. He hazarded a glance back: the girl had gotten her gray-white hand wrapped around his ankle. Her sweater and other hand were soaked in blood now, and her eyes were crazed. She was licking pink foam off her lips and she coughed a Pepto-Bismol mist.
When she started to whine—to keen, really, a high, shrill sound that was getting louder by the second and that Louis was certain would drive him out of his mind if he had to endure it for even one second more—he came to his senses and kicked free, knocking her onto her side. His ankle was freed, but he felt a sudden, vertiginous lurch, as though the floor had collapsed beneath him, as though there had been an earthquake. It wasn’t an earthquake. It was his soul. It was his soul leaving his body. Nevertheless he clambered to his feet and crab-walked to the still-open and unoccupied jar door.
Nobody up here had moved. They were pressed to the edges of the kitchen and gasped when Louis appeared. Some girl was crying. Louis had to look fucking horrifying, even aside from the gun in his hand.
There was the front door, wide open. Cold air rushed in. Across the street, the Caddy’s headlights illuminated vertically blowing snow. Joe was trying to execute a K-turn in the street, but he was sliding all over the place. He nicked another parked car, backed fully into another one.
Fuck. Fuck! Louis said a little wordless prayer in his head to the god he didn’t believe in until just now, when he kicked the dying girl over, and he dashed out the door. He nearly wiped out on the stoop, stumbling in the snow like a child. Joe had completed the turn and for a moment Louis was certain he was going to be left behind, here at the scene of the crime, literally with blood on his hands. And it really did appear that this was what Joe was trying to do—the tires spun freely in the snow, and the big man’s face, lit by the dashboard, was intent only upon the road ahead. But before he could downshift, Louis reached the car, flung open the passenger door, and jumped in.
Joe gave him a sideways glare, and then the car was in motion. They gathered speed on the empty street.
“Fuckin’ idiot,” said Joe.
“What? Me?” Louis was still shaking. He couldn’t catch his breath; the words were more like gasps.
“Fuckin’ idiot.”
Joe’s breaths were low and fast and the air smelled like sweat. He turned left, then right, then left. They moved through downtown Broken River. The streets were quiet. The world didn’t yet know about the thing they just did.
Louis said, “What are we doing, Joe?”
Driving.
“Where?”
“House,” Joe said.
“What house?”
“The house.”
Louis didn’t get it. They’d just left the house. Then Joe jerked right at the Route 94 sign and the car slid around untethered for a couple of seconds and Louis understood.
“We’re going to the house?” he said.
“Yeah.”
The silence deepened, lengthened, and they moved inexorably through the snow in pursuit of god knows what. Louis accepted for the first time that he might not get through this night alive. His mind was working all the angles, or trying to—the conceivable modes of escape, the possible endgames. Then, as the road emptied onto the highway and the Caddy gathered speed, he remembered that there was still a gun in his hand—stuck to his hand, in fact—and he slowly, nonchalantly slipped it into his inside jacket pocket. He had to wiggle it a little to detach it from his fingers. He zipped up the jacket and reached over his shoulder for the seat belt and pulled the belt tight and clicked it home. He closed his eyes and waited.
And here we are.
22
It has been happening for some time now: the Observer is coming to understand that it does not need to “be” in one place at any one time. It doesn’t need, even, to be at one time at one time. It can be everywhere and anytime: and as the threads of cause and effect, real and imagined, that give the humans’ lives meaning become increasingly intertwined (inextricably so, at this point), it must be. It cannot properly observe the humans—and the acts they perform and compel others to perform—without pulling apart, or perhaps expanding, or doubling and trebling, or creating an all-encompassing manifestation of itself.
The Observer’s growing reach makes it feel more powerful. It can see and know all in this world (and what, it wonders, of other worlds? other consciousnesses? other phenomena, unfathomable to the humans, that it might study?), more than any single human can know about itself or its society. Indeed, it can know, if it wishes, more about humanity than all of humanity can ever hope to learn.
Yet the Observer feels less powerful than ever before: the immensity of its arena of observation throws into ever-sharper relief the fact of its incapacity to change the things it sees.
Unless—
Unless the humans’ own awareness of their stories—that is, their understanding of their own lives as manifestations of, engines of, narrative lines—can be regarded as the domain of the Observer. In which case, the Observer is a part of them.
Or perhaps the Observer is something they have made: another god in the pantheon of invisible and powerful forces they have fashioned in their image.
And if it is so—if the humans have made the Observer—does this mean that it is beholden to them? Are their powers of self-determination, of ambition, of artful untruth and strategic misdirection, dependent upon the proximity and attention of the Observer? Or may the Observer go off on its own, test its skills and their limits, explore the totality of existence as any god might?
It doesn’t know. Right now, it is certain only of its desire—and its responsibility—to see these narrative lines to their ragged ends. And of course these lines are only a few among a great many. New lines have already presented themselves, at least for most of these humans, but the humans are too absorbed in the imperatives of the moment to have yet perceived them. For unfortunate others, not many lines remain. For the equally unfortunate few, all lines have already come to an end. In truth, the Observer already knows all the outcomes, or something close to them; at this late hour, most alternate paths have been closed off.
In the wine bar in Brooklyn, New York, the woman named Rachel kneels on the floor over the woman named Eleanor. At first, she thought the woman had merely fainted, and her immediate response was annoyance. It took a lot out of her to open with an apology: to speak Eleanor’s name, look her in the eye, and say I’m sorry.
She is sorry. It took her a while to get here, but here she is. She is sorry. Not just for hurting Eleanor, but for hurting herself. Acting like a child with Karl has made her feel old. Being in his company has made her feel lonely. Irina’s call made her feel lonely, too. Watching Karl try to love the girl has caused her to remember her own father’s failures at love. It is time to change her life.
“She’s coming,” Karl told her, as though his wife were an occupying force or weather event. Rachel now understands that their move was not, as he claimed, for the benefit of Eleanor’s writing and his art, a bid for peace and quiet, but an escape from her, and punishment for his offenses against his marriage, of which she herself is one.
Rachel doesn’t like Eleanor, despite what she told Irina. She was happy to believe Karl’s insinuations (never actual lies that could be disproven) that she was cold and lifeless and uninterested in sex, and that their union was a sham, a convenience, a misguided effort to give their daughter some semblance of an orderly home. But Karl, of course, is both a bullshitter and his own principal bullshittee. His wife, she believed, deserved better than him. And better than Rachel, for that matter.
And when Rachel walked into the bar’s back room and found the woman slouching and staggering, eyes underscored with purple-gray, Rachel could see that she’d been suffering. She had barely met Eleanor’s eyes, barely begun to speak, before something seemed to set the woman’s body into twisting motion; it began to fall, glitching like a scrambled TV signal. Eleanor half-collapsed, and her eyes rolled back in her head, and all solidity abandoned her. She slid down the wood-paneled wall, knocked over a stack of folding chairs, and tumbled with them to the floor.
A body hitting the floor in a crowded bar does not go unnoticed. All conversation stopped, all heads turned. For shit’s sake, lady, Rachel thought, get hold of yourself. And then she thought better of it when she crouched beside Eleanor’s prone, unmoving form and saw the whites of her eyes and the nightmare-twitching of her hands, and smelled urine.
“Eleanor,” she says now, gently smacking her clammy cheek. “Eleanor!”
The Observer takes note of this behavior with interest. This woman, Rachel, rival to Eleanor, competitor for her husband’s attention, has shifted now to the role of helper, of nurse, of friend. Rachel takes Eleanor’s hand in hers, strokes her pallid face. The eyes focus with excruciating slowness upon her unlikely rescuer. The eyelids flutter. Something like a belch emerges from the throat. Rachel moves a strand of hair from Eleanor’s eyes.
“Can you hear me? Eleanor?”
Is this, could this be, a form of love? Can the enemy in need become, suddenly, a friend? Or is Rachel’s compassion merely an expression of projected selfishness, what she wishes Eleanor might feel were it Rachel herself doubling over in agony, folding to the ground, falling unconscious?
The woman can’t speak, but she seems to understand. A waiter arrives at Rachel’s shoulder, says, “What happened, did the chair break?” and Rachel says, “No, no, she passed out or something.” This appears to alarm the waiter. He pulls out a phone and calls for an ambulance. People have resumed talking, seeing that this event is under the control of others, has nothing to do with them; but it is clear from the tone of their voices that their evening of levity and inebriation is ruined.
Eleanor’s body is lying at a strange angle, one that a healthy human in repose would never assume. Her legs are folded up half-underneath her; one arm is flung out over her head, as though in an effort to catch something; the other arm clutches at her midriff. She seems somewhat more alert now, panicked, and little shocks travel across her face, dispatches from the malfunctioning machinery. Rachel says, “Can you move?”
If Eleanor understands the question, she doesn’t reply. But the Observer notes that her hand squeezes Rachel’s.
“Hold on,” Rachel says, and pushes the chair out of the way and rearranges Eleanor’s body—the legs out straight, the wayward arm down at her side. Rachel balls up her scarf and places it under Eleanor’s head. Eleanor has no visible reaction. Her mouth and eyelids are twitching again; the eyes reel. The waiter is still standing there, staring in evident terror, phone still in his hand.
“Why don’t you go find a blanket,” Rachel tells him.
The man looks confused for a moment, then snaps to and hurries away.
That’s the last Rachel will see of him. She holds Eleanor’s hand and waits. The Observer waits with them. Whatever just happened has taken the air out of the room; people have gathered their things and are edging awkwardly past this strange tableau, one woman on her knees, holding another’s hand.
Over the next twenty minutes—as the two paramedics arrive, entering the bar with disturbing nonchalance, like they came here for after-work drinks and just happened to find a woman lying on the floor; as they load Eleanor, roughly, onto a stretcher and into the ambulance; as they try to prevent Rachel from riding along until she tells them, with an inspired fierceness that surprises all three of them, that Eleanor is her wife and she will not be treated this way; as they ride to the hospital, sluicing through red lights with a vertiginous, dreamlike frictionlessness—Rachel begins a series of thoughts that she will later come to regard as transformative, the first being how wonderful it is, how selfless, that she is doing this thing, cleaving herself to the woman she has wronged in her moment of crisis, and how pleasurable it will be in the days to come, recalling what a mensch she was on this cold and miserable night on the cusp of the winter of 2017. The second thought, which comes hot on the heels of the first one, is that wow, is she ever a narcissistic whore.
There are more thoughts along these lines: about the nature of her cruel and unfeeling father, her weak-willed mother, their wealth and privilege, her own failings as their daughter and as an adult. Indeed, it takes almost no time at all, the complete unraveling of the illusions out of which Rachel has assembled her life. Watching it happen—watching this sudden shattering of barriers, opening of doors, mingling of previously confined and sequestered truths—the Observer is struck by how liberating it is for the humans to accept blame for their own misfortunes, to forgive those who have hurt them. They are capable of such anger, such violent fury, such resentment! And yet, it can all be dispelled in an instant. Rachel, as the Observer watches, is being rewarded with a feeling of bodily lightness and a surprising visual clarity, the details of the world taking on an almost surreal specificity as they assert themselves, for the first time, as entities without any relationship to her at all. Not only is Rachel no longer the center of the universe; she isn’t even the center of her own reality. Rachel is an object in the world dedicated to its own gratification and the reciprocal gratification of a small number of other, equally unimportant objects. It is as though she sees herself from outside, from above and behind, as in a near-death story; she is both observed and observer. It is not necessary to be the way I’ve been, she thinks, as the nurses and doctors swarm and confer, as they ask her questions she hasn’t the slightest idea how to answer. I can be different.
Rachel is standing in the emergency room, and Karl’s wife is being rolled into a slot and attached to machines. The light is bright and dirty and the air smells like bandages and truck exhaust. She takes a breath, approaches a doctor. Touches her arm. Says, That’s my friend. What can I do to help?
Meanwhile, in the kitchen of the house in Broken River, the young woman called Sam (and what, the Observer wonders, might have happened had she gone by some other name? Would the girl, Irina, still have chosen to believe she was the adult incarnation of the lost child Samantha? What if the man, Karl, had not found her appealing, had not held out some faint hope of sexual congress with her? Would he have declined to engage her services as a babysitter? What if she had stayed in Buffalo with her mentally ill mother? What if she had held more tightly to the hand she found in the pile of coats? The narrative lines that radiate from these plausible events and choices are distantly visible to the Observer but, upon closer examination, bifurcate, sprout tributaries, diffuse into a cloud of possibility too complicated even for the Observer to comprehend. No, Sam’s present story is its focus, and she has reached a bottleneck: there is suffering she must now endure in order to move forward. That suffering has just now begun) closes her phone and sets it down on the kitchen table, then lays her two hands on either side and wills them to stop shaking. Nothing that she has just been told makes any sense. (But it does, the Observer thinks: everything that has ever happened, and everything yet to happen, makes sense.) The voice on the phone was someone’s, some girl’s. Janet, she thinks is the name? An occasional boarder at Yetta’s, a friend, a hanger-on. Sam remembers her, sort of. On the phone just now, she was screaming and crying, and their conversation was interrupted several times, but the gist of it was that something has happened, some men came to the house, they crashed a party Yetta and Daniel were throwing, and they found the weed door and went down there, they killed Daniel and Yetta. Sam, the girl said, where the fuck are you, it was a big guy and a little guy, they took off down the street in an old car, and lock the door, Sam, because they’re out there.
