Authors: Jonathan Lethem
“What’s he going to do?”
“Nothing, at first. We’re just going to move there. There’s only a few settlers. We’ll practically be the first. It’s a chance to be there at the start of something, something very important.”
Hearing her mother talk in circles, avoiding subjects, Pella suddenly wanted to be beside her, to move inside her cone. She wanted to protect and be protected at once.
“The thing is, for people to really live there, they have to live like the Archbuilders used to. There’s this thing that happens to Archbuilders, young ones, and it would happen to people too. Except the people there now take a drug to keep it from happening.”
“What thing?” said Pella.
“It’s called becoming a witness,” said Caitlin. “It happened to young Archbuilders, which there aren’t so many of now. But it still happens.”
It’s going to happen to
me
, thought Pella. By telling only me she’s going to make it happen to me.
“Nobody in our family is going to take the drug,” said Caitlin. “Clement’s looked into it, there’s no danger. Just a chance to learn. It’s something Clement and I feel strongly about.”
Pella hated that policy talk, that Clement talk.
Feel strongly
. It was like Clement speaking out of Caitlin’s mouth. Pella relied on her mother for words that were an antidote to Clement’s.
“What does it do?”
“Well, what happens to
Archbuilders
is that the witness learns things about adults. I mean, the adult Archbuilders. It’s a way of growing up. What happens to
people
we don’t know, because nobody’s tried it.”
Caitlin said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. But why should Pella want to learn things about adults, let alone Archbuilders?
Why should she necessarily want to grow up?
After a pause, Pella said, “So how do they know anything happens? To people, I mean.”
“Because it started to happen, a few times. But people panicked.”
“What makes it happen?”
“It’s something the Archbuilders created with their science. They made viruses, special ones. Only so long ago that it’s like part of the planet now. Like a lot of things they did. Like the weather.”
“So the people take drugs. Because they don’t want to get an alien virus.” This didn’t sound exactly unreasonable to Pella. “That’s what you mean by panicked.”
Caitlin nodded, suddenly distracted. She squinted up the beach at Raymond and David, and said, “Something’s wrong.”
Raymond was at the corner, near the rocks, on the other side of the fence. David was halfway back, running toward them, and as Pella looked up he tripped over his cone and tumbled forward. He landed on his knees in the sand, his cone flattening up around him.
Caitlin rose and started out to meet him. Pella followed. They ran, cones wobbling around their ankles, to the place where David knelt.
He struggled up, his face flushed. “Raymond found something,” he gasped.
“Let’s go see,” said Caitlin. She reached under his cone, exposing her own arms, and brushed the grit from his knees. “Come on.”
“I’m scared,” he said.
“That’s okay,” said Caitlin. “Let’s go have a look.” She nudged him along.
Pella got ahead. She could see something black, high on the rock barrier; Raymond was climbing toward it, on all fours, hampered by his cone.
Pella rushed closer, and the black thing grew clearer: It had an arm, which hung brokenly in the joint of two boulders. Three steps more, and it gained a head with blistered, purple cheeks. Pella stopped running, just short of the fence, then stepped forward, hypnotized, and put her hands on the mesh.
Caitlin and David came up behind her. Raymond was still climbing. Caitlin yelled his name, but the sound was almost swallowed in the surf’s crash.
Again: “Raymond!”
He stopped there, a few feet below the body on the rocks, turned, and looked at them. Caitlin motioned with her hands. She couldn’t wave, under the cone, but she pointed, first at him, then back, to the ground at her feet.
Raymond paused, then reversed, and picked his way back down the rocks, as slowly as he’d climbed. The waves smacked again and again just short of his path.
Pella gripped the fence and stared at the twisted black body on the rocks. So did Caitlin and David, now that Raymond was safely headed back. The man was purple and black and ruptured in places, and it was impossible to think of how he’d looked, alive. The sun and the ocean had each taken their blows.
As Raymond came off the rocks and started toward the fence David began weeping.
“I’m scared,” said David again.
Raymond came up, the fence still between them. “What?” he said, to David. “Nothing happened.”
“Come back under the fence,” said Caitlin.
“The guy’s dead,” said Raymond. “He can’t hurt anybody.” But Pella saw that Raymond was trembling, actually.
“It’s okay to be scared,” said Caitlin. “It’s scary, what you saw.”
“He did the lemming thing, I guess,” said Raymond. “The fence didn’t stop him.” He kicked more sand away from the place he’d scooted under, and squatted, crablike, holding the edges of his cone.
“It’s not the lemming thing when it’s only one person,” said Pella. “It’s just suicide.”
“I want to go home,” said David.
“We’ll go home,” said Caitlin. “But Raymond’s right, nothing’s going to hurt you.” She turned David in his cone away from the fence. “It’s just upsetting to see that, but nothing is going to happen. Be brave.”
“Like an arm,” said Raymond, laughing, nudging his brother’s cone.
“Shut up,” said David, sniffling.
“Anyway, Pella, he could have been part of some big lemming thing somewhere else and only his body washed up here,” said Raymond. “The others floated—”
“Enough about that,” said Caitlin.
“Shouldn’t we report it?” said Raymond. They trudged together in a line, leaving the body on the rocks, and the adamant surf, behind them.
“We
will
report it,” said Caitlin.
“Well that’s all I was doing,” said Raymond brightly. “I was checking for I.D.”
“Okay, but I didn’t want you to touch it, or get in the water. Come on.”
Pella could hear that Caitlin was upset. They were all upset. But Pella felt only she knew it was a warning: dare to go out under the sky, dare to enter the sky, and trouble will touch you. Your tunnels will collapse. A body will fall.
Pella showered first, rinsing away the grit that had found a place between her toes, letting the rain of drops on her eyelids batter away the vivid, scorched-in impressions of the dead black body and the high malicious sun, letting the whine of the hot-water pipe erase the echo of the ocean’s crash, its awful hissing as it drew back over the sand. She soaked in her share of the hot water and more before blanketing herself in a towel. Then David took over the steamed-up bathroom, then Raymond. Caitlin waited until last.
Afterward, Pella would crazily think that if the order had been different, it would have happened to someone else, to the one who showered last. Someone besides Caitlin.
Pella and Raymond and David gathered, in their underwear, T-shirts, and wet hair, on the edge of their parents’ bed, to watch television while Caitlin took her shower. A pile of fresh laundry lay in the center of the
bed, and Pella folded it while she watched. The show was David’s choice, cartoons, which made it irksome that David wandered away in the middle. He went to the bathroom door and opened it, and the sound of Caitlin’s shower obscured the voices coming from the television.
“
David,
” said Raymond.
“I heard something,” said David. He went into the bathroom, left the door open.
Where was Caitlin’s voice, shooing David out of the bathroom? Wondering absently, Pella turned to see, just as David emerged. Not rushing, not panicked like on the beach, but puttering, his hand near his mouth, almost as if he were looking for something on the floor.
“Pella?”
“What?”
“Caitlin made a funny face and fell down.”
Pella went to the bathroom door. David tagged after her, but Raymond stayed at the television, ignoring them. Remembering later, it would seem to Pella a kind of protest, as though Raymond already knew and was registering his objection.
Pella went in. The shower poured down, but where was Caitlin? Pella moved the shower curtain.
Her mother lay splayed naked, filling the tub, slack, her eyes closed, mouth open, knees up, elbows jammed awkwardly at her sides, the surface of her stomach and breasts alive with the rain of water like a screen with static.
Pella stood shocked. The shower, curtain thrust aside, was wetting her T-shirt. She reached out dumbly and turned the shower control; the water poured out of
the faucet instead, a gush over Caitlin’s shoulder and neck. Caitlin’s mouth was soft, as if she were speaking, forgetting a word. Her lips were beaded. The water rushed under her chin.
“Caitlin?” said Pella softly.
There was no reply, no response.
“Caitlin?” she said again. Then: “Mom?”
Nothing.
“Tell Raymond to call the hospital!” Pella shouted back at David, as she turned off the hot and cold. David ran away, mute. Pella had no idea if he’d heard.
The water drained away, droplets rolling off Caitlin’s edges, leaving her wedged there. She lay still, but breathing, Pella saw. Her naked body seemed terribly big, a kind of world itself, a thing with horizons, places where Pella’s gaze could founder, be lost.
Pella ordered her thoughts. Caitlin must have slipped, and hit her head.
The dead body at the beach—
No. No relation.
Where was Clement?
She put her hand in her mother’s soaked hair, but couldn’t find a gash or lump. Nothing, she thought, maybe this is nothing. She fell, she’s okay, she’s asleep, she’ll wake up, she fell, she’s okay, went Pella’s little song of anguish. She touched her mother’s chest, feeling the heartbeat, the dewy skin, the edge of her mother’s breasts. Caitlin was so massively helpless, so impossible to protect.
She ran out to find David and bumped into Raymond, who’d been peering around the door’s edge.
“I called 911,” he said in a small voice. “They said we just have to get her into the subcar, and it’ll go right to the hospital. They make it come, they have the address from the call.”
“She’s
naked,
” said Pella. “Anyway, we can’t move her.”
“We
have
to,” said Raymond.
“Didn’t you say we were kids?” said Pella. “Didn’t you explain what happened?” Pella heard herself, thought: How could he explain what happened? Nothing happened. Nobody knows what happened.
David was sitting on the edge of their parents’ bed, moaning, gasping for breath.
“Okay,” said Pella, taking a breath. “David, stop crying. Call Clement’s office.”
“What if he isn’t there?” David whined through his sobs.
“Then tell whoever
is
there. Raymond, come on.”
Caitlin lay in exactly the same position. A rivulet of water ran down her nose. Pella took her nearest arm and pulled, drawing her shoulder up, peeling her with a pop of suction from the tub. Raymond went to the other end, and considered Caitlin’s feet. Pella, with one knee on the edge of the tub, reached over and lifted Caitlin’s other shoulder. Her mother’s insensate head lolled forward.
Raymond was gingerly lifting Caitlin’s calves, so her feet were aloft, nothing more. “She’s just folding up,” said Pella. “You have to lift her by the butt. This isn’t funny.”
“I’m not laughing,” said Raymond.
He grimaced. They moved together, under Caitlin, and shifted her weight up and out of the tub, then immediately stalled and let her come to rest on the bath mat.
“We’ll never get her down the stairs,” said Pella.
“We have to.”
They lifted her. Pella’s breath rasped. She realized she was crying. Caitlin’s arms flapped outward, and grazed the door frame as they passed through. But they didn’t drop her. Willing it, they kept her off the floor, and moving along the hallway. In silence; Pella had no breath left for words of encouragement. Just David’s crying in the next room, Raymond grunting as he worked to keep Caitlin’s weight from slipping, her knuckles from clapping along the banister.
Caitlin’s head rested crookedly against Pella’s chest. Drops from her hair and crotch made a generous trail on the hallway floor, her body seemingly weeping. But Pella’s tears evaporated as her cheeks heated with effort. Refusing to even stop and consider the challenge of the staircase, she groped backward with her foot and stepped down, nodding to Raymond to keep him coming.
One. Two. If she could manage to support Caitlin’s weight for two steps, why not the rest? She leaned against the curved angle of the stairwell there at the top, her elbow sliding along the wall. Behind her she wouldn’t be able to. But she shouldn’t think of what was behind her. She watched her mother’s stomach and breasts bunch obligingly as Raymond stepped down the first step himself, then felt the almost liquid weight of
the body shifting, sliding out of her grasp again, folding toward the middle. She struggled to hold on, and to move backward, down another step. To unfold Caitlin. Caitlin’s body.
“Pella!”
It was Clement, at the bottom of the stairs. Pella nearly fell backward. Raymond sank to his knees, and Caitlin’s legs and buttocks settled on the second and third step.
“Something happened,” Pella said, as Clement rushed up to meet them. The words were as specific as she felt possible.
“She hit her head,” said Raymond. He hugged his mother’s knees.
Clement lifted Caitlin away from them, staggering back for a moment against the banister with the weight and surprise. Pella felt a sting of satisfaction. You carry her. You be here in the first place.
“Did you call the hospital?” Clement said.
Pella nodded. “Raymond did.” She stepped back up onto the landing beside her brother.
“We were putting her in the car,” said Raymond, with a kind of anger.
Clement stood adjusting his position on the stairs, hoisting Caitlin higher in his arms, leaning back to balance the weight. He looked up from her face and nodded at Raymond. “I thought you were going to the beach,” he said blankly. “I took a cab home.”