Abandoned

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

“Comes a time, baby. That’s what Neil Young said. A time to live, a time to die. A time to go fucking insane.”

Baby is silent. There’s no light in this meadow anymore. The sun is eclipsed by the moon, shooting out light from its circular edges, bathing the world in hush-lit shadow. The trees have been stripped of leaves, and their branches twist and creak in the harsh and ever-present wind. The flowers are gone, and a dust cloud, a thousand feet high, sits on the horizon, rushing toward us in slow motion. Baby remains fuzzy and faceless, and half lit like everything else.

Leo was destroyed one week ago. I chose myself over him, though I tell myself that if I wasn’t pregnant I would have taken his place. I don’t know if it’s true, but it keeps me from chewing through my wrists to get to the veins.

“Decide,” Dali had said, then nothing else.

I had stalled with my silence. I knew what I was going to say but didn’t want to say it.

“Decide in ten seconds or it’s you,” he urged. “Don’t make me do this,” I whispered. “Five seconds.”

Then four and then three and then I spoke.

“Leo! Take him, you fuck.” I started to cry, continued as he un-cuffed my wrists and then pushed me into the darkness of my cell. What was now my home.

The guilt crushed me into oblivion and has continued to obliterate me every day since. Dali never came back to tell me that it was done, but I have no doubt of it. Dali may play games, but not those kinds of games. He does what he promises where destruction is concerned.

I have dreams about Leo. I don’t dream about Tommy or Bonnie or Alan or anyone else. I dream about Leo. I dream of his smile, and then I watch as it falls into slackness, as drool begins to drip from his chin, as his eyes fill with a blowing wind of nothing. I fall asleep on my back. I wake up curled into a fetal ball.

Nothing has changed about my environment. I breathe darkness. The rectangle of light appears three times a day. I eat. I expel. I exercise. I talk to my baby under the eclipse and the daytime stars, and I dream of Leo losing knowledge of himself as a person. Christa, his girlfriend, appears in these dreams sometimes. She points at me with an accusatory finger and laughs like a hyena, then she gathers Leo into her arms like a baby and lopes off into a forest of dead trees. I search for my small victories, the dictate of Barnaby Wallace, but victory these days is bitter.

“When are you going to start showing, baby? And what happens when you do?”

I didn’t really start looking pregnant with Alexa until I was into my fourth month. What will Dali do with a pregnant prisoner? Has he dealt with it before? I am certain that I don’t want to know the answers. Dali’s God is pragmatism. He’ll do whatever is most cost-effective.

“Perhaps he’ll let me keep you.” I shiver at the thought of Dali being gone while I go into labor. Giving birth in darkness, fumbling for my child in blindness, bringing him to my breast without ever having seen his face.

“Is that why you’re fuzzy, baby? Maybe I can’t give you form because I’m not sure you’ll ever have one.”

Baby stays silent. I moan in my dream, and my eyes fly open. I wake up to the black, and then I force myself to fall back asleep.

Unreality is a better world than here.

One more day passes before he appears again. The lights blind me, and he stuns and drugs me. I fall into nothing and wake up facing Dali. The table, it seems, can be upended to a vertical position. Dali regards me, wearing his ski mask and jacket and hiking boots.

“It seems you were right, after all. They keep hunting me, number 35. They’re very tenacious.”

I don’t say anything. I’m too afraid.

“You’re becoming a liability to my operation. I’m going to need to get rid of you.”

“No, please,” I croak. My throat has almost closed in terror.

“I’m not going to perform the procedure on you, number 35.”

The relief I feel is so deep, so physical, that I almost lose control of my bladder. I’d rather die than have my baby in that state, I realize. Leo was right.

“You’re going to kill me?” I ask.

“No. I’m going to release you.”

Confusion. As with Heather Hollister, this is a deviation. I’m grateful for it, but it makes no sense. “Why?”

“I’m going to take one thing to remember you by, number 35,” he continues, ignoring my question. “It won’t prevent you from doing what you do, but it will serve as a last example to you and others: Hunt me, and I punish.”

He’d had his hands behind his back. He brings them into view now. They are gloved, and the right one holds a knife. He says nothing else. He moves to the side and cuts off the little finger of my right hand, below the first knuckle, in a single motion.

I scream instantly and do not stop. I begin to faint, no help necessary this time, and I see it again, that physical feature I had noted days ago but was unable to articulate. I realize what it is just before unconsciousness claims me again, a welcome brother.

“Someone call 911.”

“What happened to her?”

“God, did you see her face?”

“Forget her face—what happened to her finger?”

The voices rise and fall, as the drugs inside me rise and fall, as the pain in my finger rises and falls, as the ocean pounds the shore on that Hawaiian beach somewhere, rise and fall, rise and fall. The permanencies of this world carry on regardless of what happens to humanity. The sun shines, the moon glows, the world turns.

I am on concrete. My mouth is so dry it feels filled with dust. I am surrounded by strangers with cell phones and worried eyes.

I find a woman who looks like my mother, and I reach my arms out to her.

“Please.” It’s all I can manage.

She hesitates and then comes to me and pulls me close. She’s not my mother, but then again, no one is.