Prometheus Mode, page 18
“I don’t know! I just assumed the stupid thing already came with a name.”
Nothing for a moment. Then:
“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry, Ramon. But I still don’t like it, that story. In fact, I don’t like most of the stories you choose for her. They’re always so... so dark and violent. We don’t need that right now.”
“Name one.”
“What about that book with the rabbits who have to leave their home?”
“Watership Down? Really? Okay, it has its moments, but, Lyssa, you’re overreacting again. Those parts just go right over her head. I swear, you need to stop worrying about every tiny little thing.”
“I’m not worried about every little thing. I’m worried about one thing: Cassie.”
“She’s fine, honey. She’s not going anywhere.”
“You don’t know that! You don’t know what it’s like!”
“To lose a child? Lyssa, seriously. This is ridiculous. This week it’s make-believe vampire rabbits, next week it’s... what? Garden gnomes? St Elmo’s Fire? You’ve got to let go a little. You’re smothering her.”
Silence floods the house. It fills the rooms from floor to ceiling, like an ocean. I can almost smell their anger in it, the saltiness of it. The walls are soaked with it. Their bed, too.
Finally, Daddy says, “Cassie’s not... She’s not a baby anymore, honey. She’s strong. She’s always been healthy. You need to let go of the idea that—”
“Don’t tell me what to do!”
“She’s a big girl, Lyssa, six years—”
“She’s seven.”
“Old enough to know the difference between what’s real and what’s make-believe. Do you?”
“Don’t you dare pull that crap on me, Rame. I may not be able to control what’s real all the time, but I can sure as hell control what’s not!”
bad words mama
Daddy doesn’t answer. Or, if he does, I can’t hear it.
“Please, Ramon, I’m just asking you to read her something else. Is that so hard? There are so many other books, better ones. And if she insists on rabbits—”
“You know she will.”
“Then read her Guess How Much I Love You.”
“Oh, jeez. Cassie’s too old for that.”
“I don’t care, Rame. Just find something else. I’m sick of hearing about vampires, even if they’re rabbits.”
It was Daddy who brought Ben Nicholas home. He didn’t have a name at first, not for a while, because Mom was still in the hospital and it just seemed wrong to name him until she was home and we were a family again. But when she finally did come home, she wouldn’t even look at him. She wouldn’t, and it was all on account of my little brother was dead.
He came from the place where they both work, Daddy and Mama, the place where they fix animals and make them better than when they started off. Not the animal hospital, but the other place. Laroda Island.
A lot of people say that what they do out there is wrong. They say they turn animals into monsters. But Mama and Daddy tell me to ignore them. They tell me it’s not true, they wouldn’t do those kinds of things. They want to help people, not hurt them. That’s what they say, even if they can’t figure out how not to hurt each other.
Ben Nicholas was a fat little furry fuzz ball, his hair all poufy white, except for a single brown splotch on his belly, like he’d gotten into some mud outside and it never washed off. Or someone spilled chocolate milk on him, which I never did, although once some of my mint ice cream got on his foot. Shinji licked it off. He’s also pink on his nose and his eyes are red like bubble gum. I always forget about them because the rest of him’s so white. I always just imagine him as a cloud in the sky with a little smudge of dirt.
I only saw my baby brother alive the one time, right after he came out of Mama’s belly, and I was looking at him through the window and all the tiny wires in the glass making X shapes. I was too young to go inside where they took him out of Mama, too small to wear the blue mask that Daddy and all the nurses and doctors had to wear. But that was fine by me, because there was a lot of blood on the doctor’s hands when he came out, though Mama didn’t seem to notice it or even be in any pain, although her face was shiny from sweat and white like the bed sheet. She just looked tired. Like she wanted to take a nap.
Miss Ronica was holding my hand, squeezing it. I must’ve squeezed back too hard, because she shook it and said, “Okay, that’s enough, Cassie. You’re cutting off the circulation.” Which means her fingers couldn’t breathe. “See, they’re blue.”
But not as blue as my baby brother’s skin. And it was covered in slime and all icky blue and bloody. Ucky parts of it were peeling off like candle wax.
“He’s not crying,” I noticed. “Little babies are supposed to cry right after they’re come out. That’s how they learn to breathe.”
He was just looking straight up at the lights in the ceiling of the hospital room and I could hear Mama asking for him and Daddy crying and laughing at the same time. But Remy — that’s what they had decided they were going to call him, which is short for Remington, like Grumpa’s name — was very quiet. He didn’t make a single sound.
I think maybe I knew right then that something was wrong with him, though I didn’t say anything about it at all to anybody. I didn’t want to upset Mama or Daddy or Miss Ronica. I didn’t want to seem ungrateful for having a little brother, which I knew they were afraid I was. All that mattered to me was if Remy could help put our family back together again, and not like all the King’s horses and all the King’s men couldn’t do for poor Mister Humpty Dumpty.
Maybe Mama also knew something was wrong with Remy. Maybe she could feel that God was coming to take him back, because after they got him all cleaned up and his skin wasn’t quite so blue anymore (he still hadn’t made a sound), I started seeing this new look on Mama’s face, which I’d never seen before, something besides exhaustion and relief. This new look was like she’d just woken up from a nightmare, except she wasn’t sure if she really was awake yet and the nightmare was still there, hiding just underneath her pillow or the bed.
He died the second night, which isn’t very fair, because we had already started to fall in love with him. Even me, who knew that he was sick and was maybe a little jealous of him. I knew he was sick, although that time it wasn’t because I could smell it. This was before I could smell the sickness on people. I don’t know how I knew about Remy getting closer to dying, but I did somehow.
Mama didn’t cry until after she came home a few days later, and then she cried a whole bunch for a couple of weeks, especially when we went to go visit Remy in the cemetery down the street. But finally she stopped crying, and when she did, Daddy brought her Shinji from the rescue because I already had Ben Nicholas, and he told her that he was already named — Shinji was — which made me feel bad for Mama because she wouldn’t get to pick a name like I had already secretly chosen for Ben Nicholas from the vampire bunny book, ‘a rabbit-tale of mystery,’ which was my favorite story for Daddy to read.
It turned out that she didn’t care about any of that. In fact, she barely cared anything at all about Shinji, just like she barely cared about Ben Nicholas. She was too busy being angry with Daddy all the time, like she blamed him for trying to fill in the hole Remy left in her heart when he died, and she wasn’t ready for it to be filled yet. I know Daddy didn’t want to go live in an apartment, but I also knew he couldn’t live with the sadness in the house, neither. He told me it was smothering him, which means he couldn’t breathe, and if you can’t breathe, then you’ll die.
I didn’t want Daddy to die either.
Anyway, that’s how Shinji became mine, too, which was fine because he was a good dog anyway, even if he did poop sometimes on the rug and once on the couch, which was my bed at Daddy’s place. It was on accident, because I didn’t let him out in time. You can still see the stain on the cushion if you lift it up to look underneath, even though Daddy tried to wash it a million times in the shower. He took a lot of showers. He didn’t think I could hear him crying over the noise.
Shinji was alright, but Ben Nicholas was my first pet, and it was him I always truly loved the best.
He was such a tiny little thing, a dirty little snowball, but each day he grew a little bit until he was real big, almost too big for me to carry around, all floppy feet and legs and arms, his ears hanging down like socks. He stopped growing when he was almost too big to sleep with me in my bed at night. Luckily, Shinji didn’t mind sharing. Like I said, he was a good puppy. Just like Ben Nicholas was a good bunny.
Despite what Mama believed, it never once crossed my mind that a rabbit like him could ever suck the blood from a person— or the juice from a tomato, for that matter. There are no such things as vampire rabbits. Or even vampire people. Daddy said so, and I was never ever confused about that.
But after Ben Nicholas died, I did secretly wish it could just be a little bit true. Because then he wouldn’t have stayed dead. He would’ve just come back on his own.
How many thunderstorms have I listened to, loud and angry outside these empty walls, pounding like the loud hungry noise that once filled the inside of me till it felt like I would explode from it beating, beating on the inside of my head?
hundreds
I can only feel the thunder through my feet now, through my skin. I think I’m deaf now, but not unhearing. I feel everything deep inside the middle of my head.
a thousand storms?
How many times have I tried counting as high as that? I think I might have reached a thousand once, long ago. But now I always lose track and have to start all over again from the beginning. The numbers get less and less each time when I lose track. I’m beginning to forget how to count.
It once frightened me, the thunder, but now it doesn’t. Maybe because I can’t hear it and it’s good that I can’t see the lightning. Lightning always used to really scare me, when I was sick with the disease. But now the storms come and go and I can’t remember what it feels like to be afraid of them anymore, though sometimes I wish I could be afraid, because that would be proof that I am
alive
still a part of the world.
How many storms?
millions, maybe
I can’t even imagine a number that large.
The silence fills the in-between spaces of my thoughts, when I can’t get the memories to come. Sometimes they slip too deep into the cracks of my mind and it’s too dark there for me to find and pull them out. How many hours of the endless quiet, nothing but the whisper of the breeze around the house telling lonely secrets through the lonely trees, knocking the walls, rattling the chains on my swings in the back yard. I can hear them, whispering to my skin with their clinking little voices. Calling me to come out and play.
Another step forward, another bump into the stupid wall.
bad word, cassie
I keep forgetting.
patience
first things first, cassie
shhh...
These whispers, memories of whispers, and my own thoughts are my only company. In this tiny, dark, locked room.
Oh, and this toy. I only keep it because it reminds me to remember Ben Nicholas. “It looks just like your bunny,” Daddy had told me. But it doesn’t look anything like him at all. Its eyes and nose are black instead of pink, and there’s no hot chocolate spill on its belly.
I don’t play with it. I have no need for playing no more.
The darkness in this room isn’t always the same. There are differences in it, swirling about my head, dark gray and black. Or maybe it’s just my mind tricking me. I stare hard at it and wonder if maybe I’ve become blind, too. Maybe my eyes have grown large from being in this darkness for so long, like the movie we watched about those funny-looking monkeys on TV who are awake only at night. Or maybe my eyes have sealed over, turned useless like the blind creatures that live in caves. Blind, and yet seeing.
Deaf, yet hearing.
Not smelling, not tasting.
what would it feel like to be hungry again?
say grace, honey?
Thank you, Lord, for this meal that we are about to partake.
Do I sit down and rest while I wait?
Do I lay me down to sleep and pray the Lord my soul to keep?
Not yet. Not yet.
It hasn’t been long enough yet.
patience
I stand and wait and watch the spinning darkness with my blind eyes. I listen to the itching sounds with my deaf ears, willing them to feel the beating of my own heart. They can’t. Because it doesn’t. Beat. No more.
Now that I have been cured. Now that the sickness is gone from me.
just silence
All around. Forever. Until—
Until forever suddenly shatters with the hard sound of breaking of glass, a noise so bright that it cuts the skin of my mind and makes me nearly fall over backward.
mama? Is that you? is it time?
But the silence returns, a dark blanket which grows over me.
smothering me
Hello?
mama? daddy?
No sound but the whisper of emptiness, and so I know it’s nothing but the wind yet. Again.
The first time it happened, the first time I heard a window break, it made me hope it was them coming back. It seemed like such a long time after Daddy
promised to return when they found the cure
locked me in here so I could make Ben Nicholas Real. A long time ago. But it isn’t them, and so I knew I hadn’t waited
forever
long enough.
I don’t let the sounds tease me anymore. I’ve learned patience. I don’t mind waiting. I don’t get hungry. Or tired. I don’t need to hurry. Mama and Daddy know I’m in here. They’ll know when to come and open the door. They
promised
finally understood why I did what I did.
Nothing but the hard wind on the delicate glass. Until—
Until I
feel
hear the front door open for the first time in a
million years
long time, and suddenly this thing stirs deep inside of me. I can’t stop it. I don’t want to stop it. A moan slips through my lips, sounding more of hunger than of loneliness, and for the first time in forever the first pangs of it wake deep inside my throat and start to claw their way out.
not yet!
I try to push the feeling down and away. My thoughts are only for Ben Nicholas.
“First things first,” as Daddy always said.
The sound of a footstep presses against the skin of my face. There! In the kitchen! Just one step, silence, waiting. Then another.
More waiting.
I’m in here! I want to cry out, but my lips are too dry, too stiff. My tongue is a stone in my mouth, and the wind that passes through my throat stirs only a memory of what my own voice once sounded like.
More footsteps follow in a rush, hurrying through the kitchen, entering the living room, getting closer. Closer! Stopping. A door in the hallway opens — not mine — closes. More steps.
Then, suddenly:
too bright!
The door closes before I can react. My body is too slow. It’s forgotten how to move. The footsteps fade away before I can call out their names.
mama
daddy
come back
But all too quickly, the front door closes again and I am alone once more. The swirling silence returns and smothers me.
I want so badly to feel sadness. I can’t even do that.
But I do feel something, something I haven’t felt in a long time: wanting.
My chest tightens and another moan rises in my throat.
first things first, baby
Okay. It wasn’t them anyway, Mama and Daddy. It was
food
someone else, someone sick with the disease.
How long has it been since I’ve heard the sound of breathing and the beat of a living heart?
forever
How long since I’ve smelled their terrible disease?
But first things first. I’ll wait as long as it takes.
Until.
The bat was the first one, not Ben Nicholas. The bat was how it started.
I don’t really know how long Ben Nicholas had been sick, when I first started smelling it on him. A few days maybe. I didn’t notice until after I started smelling it growing inside of me. But even before that, I think I must’ve known something was wrong with him, just like I knew about Remy before he died. Ben Nicholas wasn’t acting right. He wasn’t as playful. He wasn’t
hungry
eating right.
It was Miss Ronica who found the dead bat outside on the back lawn. She was just going to throw it into the trash and not tell anyone.
“But what if it’s not dead?”
“It is, Cassie. Just keep away from it.”
“But what if it can be fixed? Maybe Mama or Daddy can fix it?”
“They’re not that kind of animal doctors, Cass. Besides, bringing dead bats back to life isn’t their specialty. And it’s definitely dead. Not only that,” she added in a stern voice, “but they already have a lot on their minds and don’t have time for this. Now, I’m going to the shed to find a shovel, so don’t you touch it. It could still have germs. You hear me?”
I nodded that I did.
“Good. And keep Shinji away from it, too.”
She looked down at it one last time and shivered, like seeing it made her cold. But it didn’t frighten me. Seeing the poor thing only made me sad. I wanted to save it. I didn’t want it to be dead.
I held out as long as I could. But she was taking too long getting the shovel and all I wanted to do was touch its fur for just a second to see how soft it was. To see if it was as soft as Ben Nicholas’s. But it wasn’t
dead
