In Universes, page 4
I’m scared of the dark, Raffi thinks to Britt. I have nightmares. She closes her eyes and the images are there waiting, shadows twisting themselves into creatures with hungry, golden eyes, some with teeth and some with claws, coming for her dad, for her, for everyone she loves. She feels tears welling and swallows. Britt squeezes her shoulder, and the shadows recede until it’s just the two of them again.
I’m scared too, Britt says. Not of the dark, but of other things. Raffi doesn’t ask what things, though later she will wish she had.
Raffi’s new school feels like a fresh start. From kindergarten through sixth grade, she’d gone to a small Jewish school where her grade had only twelve students and she got free tuition because her mom worked in the office. Sixth grade had been a bad year for Raffi—everyone knew her parents were getting divorced and she got a write-up for whispering with her best friend when they were supposed to be praying and her best friend became friends with the most popular girl at school and stopped talking to her. But Raffi has a new best friend now, and seventh grade will be different. Her dad takes her shopping and buys her a whole new outfit even though it’s expensive. Raffi brushes her hair and puts on strawberry ChapStick. But when she gets to school, everything she’s wearing is wrong. The cool girls here wear polo shirts and carry designer purses. Raffi tries to will herself into invisibility, but this is difficult when she has to keep introducing herself to the class.
“Do I know you?” a girl asks, in biology. “Weren’t you at that Fourth of July party at the O’Learys’?” Raffi nods. Jacqueline is chatty and friendly and has most of her classes with Raffi. At lunch, she waves Raffi over to her table, and Raffi feels the knot in her stomach loosen a little.
It’s not until the third day of school when Raffi is finally starting to relax that she mentions her friend Britt who has the most beautiful horse in the world and—
“You don’t mean Brittney Mason, do you?” Jacqueline asks. “You know she’s like, a huge lesbo, right? Oh my god, did she ever come on to you? You guys aren’t, like, girlfriends are you?”
“What?” Raffi says. “No! No, I just rode her horse, I didn’t even know—I don’t know—” It feels like the time her mom slapped her, leaving a handprint on her cheek that stunned them both into silence.
Jacqueline is staring at her, a half grin on her face. The other girls are watching too. Raffi imagines saying I know all Britt’s secrets, if that were real I’d know, but that would only make things worse. And besides—is it true?
“It’s not like that,” Raffi says. “I’m not into that. My dad was just paying her to give me some riding lessons. ’Cause I love horses.”
“Oh yeah, that makes sense I guess,” Jacqueline says. “Anyway, I heard she got caught making out with a girl behind the tennis court last year.”
“Her sister’s a total slut too,” someone else says. The girls are all leaning in now, elbows on the table, swapping stories they’ve heard about Britt and her family. “I heard her mom fucked Janine’s dad.” “Have you seen that couch in their yard?” “Gross.” “They’re such trash.” Raffi tastes bile. She breathes through her nose, swallows hard. She thinks, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.
Raffi stops going to Britt’s house. She’s afraid that even without going near, Britt will hear her thoughts. Maybe that’s why Britt hasn’t called or dropped by.
She doesn’t tell her dad she’s stopped taking lessons. She puts his money in an envelope. In school, she sits with Jacqueline, who bombards her with a stream of gossip so constant that Raffi doesn’t have to say anything. Sometimes they get together outside of school, but mostly Raffi pretends her dad is too strict. “That makes sense,” Jacqueline says, her favorite phrase. “It’s probably ’cause your mom left him. Probably he’s afraid you will too.”
When Raffi has $110 in the envelope—riding lesson money plus all her own savings from babysitting—she shoves it into her pocket and pulls on her tie-dye shirt. Britt is cantering Calypso in circles when Raffi shows up. No shorts and flip-flops this time, she’s wearing tan breeches and tall black boots, her spine ramrod straight. The boots are worn and there’s a hole in the knee of the breeches, but still—if the girls from school could see Britt now, they wouldn’t be able to call her trash. Raffi feels extra shabby. She thinks about leaving before Britt can notice her, but at the thought, Britt looks over. She doesn’t smile.
Raffi sits on the grass outside the wire fencing and watches Calypso’s floating gait. She hopes Britt will keep riding forever. But eventually Britt’s circles slow and then she’s walking Calypso over to where Raffi is sitting. She doesn’t say anything, just looks down at Raffi from so high up.
All the words Raffi wants to say are ricocheting around her chest. She thinks them—I’m sorry I haven’t been around, I’m sorry I didn’t defend you, is it true what they said?—and hopes Britt can hear, even though they’re not touching. She holds out the envelope. It trembles in the space between them.
Britt takes it. Raffi looks at Calypso so she won’t have to watch Britt. Do you hate me too? she thinks to the horse, who blinks at her.
Are you kidding me? Britt says. She throws the envelope back at Raffi, but it’s too light, it drifts gently to the ground.
Raffi shoves thoughts of Britt and Calypso and apples beneath the surface of the lake and freezes the water solid. She goes to school, impresses her new teachers, comes home, and reads the section of the time travel book that talks about going back in the past to save someone you love. “As far as we understand today,” it says, “this can only be accomplished if the many-worlds theory of quantum mechanics is true. And if that is true, then there is already a parallel universe in which your loved one is okay now. That’s because all possible universes exist. Unfortunately, you are in the wrong one.”
It’s the middle of October before Raffi sees Britt again. She’s doing homework with Jacqueline at the pink house. “It’s too empty in here,” Jacqueline said the first time she came over, but Raffi’s dad had gotten a table by then, so there was a place to sit and do math problems, and no siblings to bother them.
When someone knocks on the door, Raffi startles so hard she drops her pencil. She can’t remember anyone ever knocking on the door before. It’s already dark outside and she wishes her dad were home. She thinks of the SS pounding on people’s doors in the middle of the night. She doesn’t move until Jacqueline asks, “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Without the prompting, maybe Raffi wouldn’t have. But she gets up obediently.
Britt is so disheveled Raffi barely recognizes her. There’s dirt on her face, sweat stains under her arms. She smells like horse manure and BO. Raffi shifts to block her from Jacqueline’s view. What are you doing here? she asks.
Raffi, Britt says, pushing hair out of her face. Raffi, I need the money. I’m sorry I threw it back at you.
What? Raffi says. Why? Her brain is moving too slowly, she’s still existing in the moment before Britt knocked, still sitting at the table trying to solve for x.
Cally, Britt says, and she starts to cry, hiccupping sobs that make it hard for Raffi to understand her, loud enough that she knows Jacqueline can hear. Cally’s colicking. I don’t have enough money for the vet, and it’s colic, Raffi, it happens so fast, I don’t have time, you have to help.
Snot glistens on Britt’s upper lip, and Raffi is frightened and furious. Why couldn’t Britt have taken the money when she offered it?
“Raphaela?” Jacqueline says from behind her. “What’s going on? What’s she doing here?” Raffi doesn’t say anything. “Are you asking her for money?” Jacqueline says to Britt, and Britt looks at Raffi, just looks at her, and like a bubble popping into her mind, Raffi sees Calypso, eyes wide and panicked, nostrils flaring, kicking at her own stomach, her beautiful stomach, gray coat lathered with sweat. Raffi’s anger vanishes. She thinks to Britt, Of course I’ll help you, the back door’s unlocked, the envelope is under my mattress, you’re my best friend, I love you, but Britt doesn’t stop crying, her face shows no relief, she stands there, icicles of snot stretching from her chin, and Jacqueline says, “I think you should go,” and Raffi watches as Jacqueline shuts the door in Britt’s face. She doesn’t open it back up, doesn’t run to her room for the envelope, doesn’t respond to whatever Jacqueline is saying. She stands there, facing the closed door, and she thinks that if there is a parallel universe where everyone you love is okay, then there must also be one where everyone you love is already gone, and she wishes herself there, to the place where there is nothing left to fear.
Chapter Three
What Is Left to Fear
Raffi stares into the grizzly’s eyes. They are molten gold. Alien, appallingly beautiful. Come on, she thinks to the bear. She has spent her life cowering before the great vast nothing of death, but, Come on, what are you waiting for?
The bear stands on its hind legs and looks down at her. Immobile, as if harmless. As if it hadn’t, only moments before, torn through the planks Raffi had nailed over the windows of the house where she grew up with her Aunt Zlata. The same house where she and Graham had constructed their little life together, not the life Raffi had once hoped for, maybe, but a life nonetheless. Until the bear came and swiped a paw across Graham’s face so effortlessly it could have been a lover’s slap, but for the cracking of bone. Raffi watched him crumple and what she felt was not devastation—it was a zeroing. Her life a list of subtractions until here, at the end of everything, everyone was gone.
Come on, Raffi thinks again to the bear, though she knows it’s a fool’s errand to send one’s thoughts out into the world and expect a response. The bear stares and stares and then it drops back onto four legs and pads silently out of the house, leaving Raffi alone with Graham’s body.
She walks to the basement door—calmly, as though she’s been waiting for this moment, and maybe she has. As she climbs down the stairs, she has a flash of certainty: Graham will be waiting for her there, sifting through his old rugby gear, searching for a helmet. A helmet will solve their problems.
The basement is full of the detritus of their life, but it is empty of Graham. Raffi finds his rugby helmet anyway and slips it on before grabbing the sled she came for. Back upstairs, she hefts Graham’s body onto the sled, shoulders her backpack, and unlocks the front door for the first time in months onto a frigid Montana morning. It’s July—or maybe August?—but there’s snow on the ground. And thank god for the broken climate, for the slickness of snow that lets the sled’s runners slide over the frozen ground.
The streets are, of course, deserted. Paradise, Montana. Population 184 before the world ended. Paradise, where Raffi moved when she was fourteen, shedding childhood like snakeskin, refusing to call home because if she heard her dad’s voice she’d have to return to him, and if she returned she’d have to face Britt. Paradise, where she’d moved in with her great-aunt Zlata. Who’d had the foresight to die before all of this.
Raffi hauls Graham’s body through the empty streets and waits for the animals to come for her. No one comes. She walks and she thinks about how she has survived every loss she’d imagined unsurvivable. She has survived and her survival is a miracle and the miracle is a cruelty. A cruelty, how a body can endure, how the heart circulates blood and the lungs suck in air and the whole machine keeps running, regardless.
She walks and her heart pounds and her lungs inhale the cold, bright morning. The padding of Graham’s helmet cradles her skull. She is walking toward a house a few miles outside of town, where the person who had once been her closest friend might still be living. Might still be alive. We’re heading to that place my mom used to clean. The one with an electric perimeter, Kay had said a few months earlier, when the animals had just begun to change. The statement had almost been an invitation. Almost, but not quite. Good luck, Raffi had said. Like life was a game of tennis. Like good or luck still existed. Good luck, good night, goodbye.
Raffi walks until her arms and back are throbbing, until each step feels impossible. Until she sees Kay’s husband, Buck, in the distance. Then she sits down on the hard ground and waits for him to find her.
Buck is a hunter, who’s never seemed to find any irony in the deer he shoots or the cuts of venison he used to store in the freezer. Even from a distance, Raffi can see the AR-15 resting on his shoulder, and she thinks what a joke it would be, after all this time, to die by startling a man with a gun. She starts laughing, and she can’t stop. When Buck gets to her, he takes in the situation at a glance, throws Graham’s body over his shoulder, and carries it off. Raffi stays where she is until Buck returns and throws her over his shoulder too. He delivers her to Kay like one more body.
“Hi,” Kay says. “You made it to the taxidermy garden.”
The taxidermy garden isn’t a garden. It’s a chalet, all hand-hewn logs and woodstoves and floor-to-ceiling windows crowded with snowcapped mountains. The only plants in the taxidermy garden are bodies, and the bodies are not exactly taxidermied, but that is the closest word Raffi can find to describe what Kay is doing to them.
What Kay does is take the bodies down to the basement and empty them of their insides and fill them with new, longer-lasting substances. Before the world ended, she was a woodworker. Now she turns people’s wounds into decorations the same way she used to take pieces of wood and seal their knots and whorls with shimmering teal enamel so that flaws metamorphosed into features.
She explains this as though she expects Raffi to understand. And Raffi does. What else is there to do with their dead? With their remaining days?
The bodies lounge on couches, sit at the dining room table, lie in perpetual slumber in the chalet’s many beds. They aren’t what Raffi would call lifelike—their angles are too strange, their stillness not at all like that of sleep. But this makes them somehow more lovely, the way they wear their own death as an adornment, like a diamond necklace, like an elaborate and absurd peacock-feather hat. When Raffi looks at her old neighbor whose leg is now made of concrete, it pours out of him so naturally that it is difficult for her to remember that once he had a leg made of flesh, before the mountain lion tore it off and he ended up here. If it were less beautiful, she thinks, it would be easier to remember how things used to be.
The taxidermy garden wouldn’t exist if the animals—the mountain lions and bears and coyotes and so forth—acted like real animals. If they ate their prey, if they dragged it off to dens or into the underbrush, if they stripped flesh from bone, there would be nothing left for Kay or Buck to find and haul back to the chalet. Then again, if the animals acted like real animals, there wouldn’t be any need to have a taxidermy garden at all.
Kay doesn’t ask Raffi what happened to Graham. Doesn’t ask how she’s doing. Doesn’t hold Raffi in her arms and say that she’s glad Raffi is still alive. She explains the workings of the taxidermy garden and then she disappears down the basement stairs. There are bodies waiting for her. Graham among them.
Raffi spends the day wandering the taxidermy garden, greeting its many inhabitants. The bodies belong to people Raffi knows. It feels good to see them again. I’m sorry, she thinks, to the neighbor she hated, to Graham’s father, to her aunt’s hospice nurse. I’m sorry that you’re dead and I’m alive.
At dinner—venison, of course—Raffi sits at one end of the large dining room table, across from Buck and Kay, next to the woman who used to own the diner. The woman has gray hair that’s coiled into a bun and a wide grin that’s almost, but not quite, like the one she used to flash whenever Raffi slipped into the diner to splurge on a cup of coffee or a plate of pancakes. The wrinkled flesh of her neck slips seamlessly into wood now, a smooth, varnished oak that disappears beneath the collar of her shirt.
They eat in silence until Raffi can’t bear the sound of her own thoughts anymore. “How do you keep the electric fence running?” she asks.
Buck launches into an explanation about solar power, like she’d known he would. About the creatures that have slipped through, his system of patrolling. Kay pushes her foot against Raffi’s leg under the table, and Raffi feels the contact through her whole body. She’s only half listening when Buck mentions the grizzly.
“Lurking in the trees,” he’s saying. “Unnatural.”
Raffi makes a noise, interrupting Buck’s monologue. It’s my fault the bear is here, she could say. But Kay’s foot is warm against Raffi’s leg and she is tired to her bones. So instead she asks the pointless, ridiculous question “Why do they hate us?”
Buck shakes his head. “The aliens don’t give a fuck about us. They just kill because they’re living inside the animals, and that’s what animals have always wanted to do.”
“You think dogs have always wanted to kill people?” Raffi asks. Kay pushes her foot harder against Raffi’s leg. Raffi takes it to be support, but it might be Kay’s way of telling her to shut up.
“They’re descended from wolves, aren’t they?”
Raffi thinks about the Siberian husky she and Graham had. After the animals changed, Graham took him out into the yard and came back alone. She woke in the middle of the night to the movement of him sobbing next to her. “That’s bullshit,” she says now. “The aliens aren’t mindless. There’s a logic to all of this.”
“There’s a logic to a hawk eating a rabbit,” Buck says. “That doesn’t mean the hawk is the next Einstein.”
Kay nudges Raffi harder under the table. Raffi could tell Buck how Einstein once made a list of rules for his wife to live by: do my laundry, bring me food, renounce all expectations of intimacy. How he wrote, in a letter to the cousin with whom he was having an affair: I treat my wife like an employee whom I cannot fire. But what would be the point? Raffi grabs Kay’s foot with her hand and doesn’t say anything else, only holds it there and watches the bloodred sky fade to orange, then indigo. The evening star appears, bright on the horizon. Electricity ceding brilliance to the stars again, here in the aftermath of the end of the world.
