My fingertips had started tingling, which is often the first way I find out I’m hyperventilating. I don’t think the question was meant unkindly. These were good people trying to make an important decision. I mean a decision that becomes important at that scale, if you can zoom in to that room, into its nooks and crannies, all its little labyrinths, its ideas and ideologies and institutions. They didn’t know anything about why I’d been away those weeks. They didn’t know anything about me at all. They weren’t my friends, I didn’t have friends.
And in any case, the problem was not the question but the answer. Its being so obvious. Of course I could not be trusted to remain stable. I was not just liable to disintegrate in any responsible role, I was in the process of disintegrating right then and there, as they watched. I was a flimsy collection of dust particles glued together with a mishmash of borrowed character arcs—to trust in such a thing to do anything but disintegrate would be fucking ridiculous. To the extent that they thought they had a real creature in front of them, they were subject to a kind of illusion. There was no matter there. Nothing that mattered.
I decided, though, that I should not say this. Pas devant les étudiants and all that. Instead I ran rapidly through all the possibilities for lying, and landed on trying to smile. Women are supposed to smile. But the movement didn’t feel like it was turning out right, so I hastily retreated to pursed lips and added a nod and a frown—this is the signal for thinking, which is allowed. The main thing was not to do anything crazy. I breathed slower as my chest and intestines filled with cold water and my hands froze into dead lumps.
I found I could still make sounds in the front of my face—the air was vibrating there, just with no connection anymore to anything on the inside. I couldn’t tell if my lungs were full or empty. They felt very shallow. Don’t worry if the bag does not inflate, I heard the spiel from some airline safety video reassure me. Oxygen is flowing.
I watched the recording of the interview online later, and learned that I had started talking about difficult lessons, how I would bring all my experience to the role to the best of my ability, crap like that. It was a strong performance and I am not ashamed of it. Still, something inside of me was dead afterwards and I could not make it alive again. Not even alive enough to run away. So I guess I’ll die in Seattle.
—
Old sins have long shadows. My aunt loved that saying. She loved it because Poirot loved it, which really means Agatha Christie loved it. You see, there’s usually a real person behind a legend. A truth in every fiction, or the other way around. Take Dr. Watson. His first name is John, except in one story his wife calls him James. Conan Doyle knew a real man called Dr. James Watson. But he probably also met someone else who was a military doctor invalided home from Afghanistan. And he definitely knew another doctor who was friends with one Joseph Bell, whom Conan Doyle says was the inspiration for Holmes. So who’s the real Dr. Watson? That’s a stupid question. All of these men can be parts of Watson. Fiction steals from real life in pieces. It’s picky. But it pays us back with interest. How many bits of fiction are used to make up one of us, out here in the real world? Perhaps it’s not so much theft as a reciprocal traffic in changelings. History transplants.
Until I was six months old, my aunt would put me down to sleep in a little room at the back of the house. It was just a cupboard really, despite having a small, grim window. The window only managed to emphasize the claustrophobia. The space was too small and shadowy to be of use for anything except storage. Storage, in this case, of me.
My aunt would tell it like a ghost story. How she and I were alone in the house one night. (My uncle was probably out drinking, or with other women, but she didn’t mention that part.) In the small hours, I started screaming. Incessant and desperate screaming, the sound of a pure white mortal fear. A universal, primal, preverbal sound: the kind of emission that bypasses the mind and the will, that must take priority over everything else, even breathing. My aunt shoved her way in through the heavy velvet door curtain, and froze in place when she saw the scene.
As she tells it, my terry cloth nappies had been snatched from their tidy pile under the crib, torn up and strewn about the floor. One was wrapped part way around my throat. I was blue in the face. She ran to me and snatched me from my cot. Then she stayed up with me all night, cradling me in front of the inadequate electric fire in the living room, as we shivered and cried together.
The next day, she closed the door to the back room and put a padlock on it. I was never allowed to go in there again. Years later, my aunt made friends with a medium. The first time she came to the house, she said there was “something bad” about that room, and my aunt, wide-eyed with wonder, told the story.
—
Old sins have long shadows. Well then, why shouldn’t they fall both ways? Forwards and backwards in time. I mean, what if it works like The Terminator—something sent to hunt me down before I can do any damage. What damage? What sin? That’s the question. And that’s exactly
