The Children's Hospital

3

The problem in me is the problem in the world. The problem in the world is the problem in me. I have always known this. Even when I did not understand it, it was still in me, the question and the answer together, knotted up like a pair of hands clenched together in pathetic anguished prayer.

When I was five years old I tried to kill my sister. All day long I tried to kill her. In the morning I put mothballs in her cereal, but our mother woke up and threw them away, not because she smelled the naphthalene, but because she thought cereal was for trailer park kids, and on the days when she could get out of bed in time — a century’s weight of ghosts kept her sleeping or staring at the ceiling in her darkened room until noon many days — she would make us fancy omelets.

I took my sister for a walk and tried to sacrifice her on a stone picnic table in the Severna Forest Coliseum. I knew the story of Isaac. I knew the whole of the Old Testament by then. I raised a smooth stone as big as my fist and prepared to knock a hole in her skull. I waited too long, imagining the blood on the stone and a clump of her hair matted to it. A troop of Brownies came rustling through the tall grass — the coliseum was built by a wealthy Baptist with a passion for Greek tragedy and outdoor theater, but once he moved away it was let to fall into disrepair — and Jemma leaped off the table and ran to dance with them around one of the decaying plaster statues.

I tried to drown her in the tub. Our mother was throwing a party for the elites of our neighborhood, which is to say for everybody, since everyone who lived there was odiously rich, the cat-food magnate having established a tradition of exclusivity in this heavily wooded peninsula on the Severn. She sent us together to the tub, and I washed my sister’s hair, just as I had been taught to do, and then when she ducked under the water to rinse I held her there. I had never been taught to drown a person, but I knew just what to do. My hands felt old and wise as she struggled under them. I am sending you to Jesus, I told her. But I remember the moment perfectly, and I know I was not trying to kill her because I thought it would make her happy.

And finally I pushed her off the roof. We dressed up for the party, and wandered from drunk to drunk, inhabiting a whole different world from the one at their level of sight. Four feet off the ground, nobody noticed if you stole a cigarette from where it was burning in the ashtray, or nipped from unattended drinks. No one noticed that I was drunk. I only got more sullen and angry, and so it hardly showed. We were sent to bed, but we did not sleep. I took Jemma out on the roof, something I did all the time. And usually I would tell her all the things that had made me angry that day, or point out lights on the river, or try to get her to see shapes in the stars. But tonight all I could think of was the crowd in our house and on the deck. It was late in September but very warm, and from where we sat on the top of the roof I could see men in short sleeves and women in short dresses, but none of them thought to look up, and they would probably not have seen us anyway in our dark pajamas.

Look at them, I said to my sister. Just look at them! And I thought that she must be like me, and that just for her to see them would be for her to hate them, like just to see the world was to hate it, every little cloud and bird and bush, and just to look in the mirror was to hate myself so much I could feel a trembling ache all over my body. One day I’ll go, I said, and then I’ll take them all. I did not know what it meant, to go. I only knew it was the right word, and the right sentiment — sudden and strange and certain as a divine inspiration. And then I pushed her at them, because I was sure just in that moment, though I knew better as soon as she started to roll, that she would be a bomb to kill them all when she hit.

Right away I regretted it. It was a mistake to push her, and it had been a mistake to try to drown her, and stone her, and poison her. It was a mistake because it was a horrible sin, the worst thing I had done and the worst thing I would ever do, and now it had set the tone and the theme for my whole life. And it was a mistake because I knew, just in that moment when I was revealed to myself as utterly depraved and irredeemably vile, that it was I and not my sister who must be the deadly sacrifice.