The Phoenix Compound
October 20
Twinkle, twinkle little star...
I bounce the baby on my knee, smiling in blank maternal Affection at the happy gurgles and the dimples on the cherub cheeks. I smile so hard it hurts.
How I wonder what you are...
It's one of the only three rhymes I remember. I remember stars and hush little baby and one, two, pick up shoe. I know a few more stories, but tonight I don't want to think, only recite. A phonograph mother. A broken record.
Up above the world so high...
At dinner, Jean showed up with a bloody lip. It wasn't swollen Or even spilt, but bitten clean through. Bright red liquid coated her mouth and spilled down her chin like old wine. Only it wasn't wine.
Like a diamond in the sky...
Scott walked very calmly from the room, his face the color of ash in winter. He came back five minutes later, wiping the corners of his mouth with his sleeve. I smelled bile on his breath. He did not eat.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star...
He said nothing to me, but took a wad of bills from under his mattress and walked into the night, a red and black shadow between the shadows.
How I wonder what you are...
He has not come back yet.
I wonder what I'll do if Scott does not return. I tell it to myself Like a story.
The girl isn't afraid anymore. She doesn't care what happened to her last time; she ignores it. She ties Will to her back and clips the barbed wire fence behind the room. Forty, fifty, a hundred fifty miles later, she stops-- most likely at one of those diners with greasy eggs and sludge coffee. No one cares enough to ask what she is. They feel sorry for her, a pretty girl with only one pair of jeans to be her name and a fatherless baby on her hip. So they give her a job. Will plays with the silverware while she washes dishes and takes Orders from truckers who like her short checkered skirt and Mississippi drawl. The cook, a middle-aged woman with wrinkles in her forehead and fat rolls around her waist, becomes her friend. They share a trailer. Life settles down the way life does, even after barbed wire fences. Who knows, she might even date a few of the local boys-- drink ice-cold beers in pickup trucks and line dance to the Dixie Chicks-- but it'll only be practice. Practice for when he walks through the door, chewing his cigar and growling at her customers. She's forgiven him everything, by then.
(What are ya doin' here, kid?
Waiting for you.
Am I late?
No more than usual.
C'mon, let's get out of here.
Okay.)
She smiles.
But this does not happen. Or it does, but in another universe. An alternate dimension of space.
In this world, the world still inside the fence, still behind the veil, I put a sleeping child (not mine, even though it feels like it) into his crib and then walk back to my bed. Waiting up is inevitable, but I should at least pretend to try and sleep. Scott never knows I wait for him, when he's doing his pushups or shadow fighting past midnight. He doesn't know I've been up until dawn, some nights, watching him pummel at his demons, just to make he doesn't forget that the night won't last forever. I did. I forgot. I'm not going to let it happen to him.
I've already crawled under the blanket when the door opens and the shadow with the ruby eye walks into the room. A mix of moonlight and electric light does things to the mind; we stare at each other the way we did when he found me in the bar. Strangers. Ghosts. Then again, how much do I know about him? We've memorized the same poetry and I've held his child, but I've never heard him talk about his favorite color, or food, or television show. He fights for me every month but he doesn't even know my real name.
He watches me a moment longer, the light bulb dripping a thin golden sheen over his visor. It makes the crystal look wet, viscous. Like blood, or is that what I see on the rest of his face? Not in liquid or color but in tangible sadness.
The wad of money lands on the table with a limp thud. All our regrets must be soft; the baby's asleep.
"He won't let me buy her."
I search for anger or hatred but the voice is disembodied from all feeling, from his body itself.
"Five hundred dollars and he wouldn't take it. Wouldn't even let me see her."
He sets a crinkled paper bag on the table and takes out a clear bottle filled with golden brown liquid. It is partly empty. Logan and I used to make bets on what Scooter would be like stone drunk. I don't want to know anymore.
"She told me she loved me. In my head. That I should go before I got hurt. Before she got hurt."
A grate of aluminum against glass; he unscrews the cap and takes a drink.
"I came so close to killing him. If we didn't have Will to think about, I would have."
Another drink.
"Tell me this is better than the outside. Tell me this isn't killing us just as fast."
He wipes his mouth with his sleeve and looks down at the bottle.
"You know, I really hate this stuff."
He picks it up and walks back out the door. The sound of liquid sloshing against sand.
I have said nothing because there is nothing to say. He's right on both counts. I could tell him my story, the story of the outside. I could tell him what they did to me. But I have also seen the blood on a woman's mouth. The desolation in a young man's face.
/Tell me it isn't killing us./
I can't.
The door shuts again. Footsteps echo across the room and the Sound ends beside my bed. I pull the blanket closer. A gesture of protection, like the veil, but not from him. Or not only from him. Shadows, I tell my mind. Instinct. He isn't the only one who's afraid of the dark.
"What does he call you?"
"Who?"
"Logan. What's your name?"
My name. I see. A gesture of intimacy, of trust. My name and my hands are the two things I have always hidden, for part of the same reason he hides his eyes. Partly necessity, partly fear. My fingers trace abstract art onto the blanket and I look at the window as I talk. I talk to the stars not to the man standing beside me.
"Marie."
The syllables dissipate into the darkness, tea leaves stirred up from the bottom of the glass.
"Marie." He rolls the sound across his tongue. "It's pretty."
"He thought so. I mean, he never told me, but I could see it in his face when he said it."
"I'm sorry we lost him."
"Why?"
"Why am I sorry?"
"Why did you ask my name?"
I turn my face to him, and find myself staring at unfamiliar territory. I haven't really looked at him since we arrived here (did that make it easier not to think of him as vulnerable too?) but now I don't know how I could have missed such differences. Wrinkles at the corners of his mouth pull his lips down into a lingering sigh of resignation. His muscles are harder now, more rigid, defined. I always saw him through Logan's eyes-- a boy trying to become a man-- but now I see him as the opposite. A man searching through the pieces of his life for the boy he lost. If I were to pull away the visor, I would imagine that his eyes have aged most of all.
How is my face different? My eyes?
"I wanted to know who you are..."
"Why?"
"Why not?"
Here he pauses, staring not at me but through me, looking out the window.
"You know the tests are coming up soon."
"Not something I'd exactly forget, is it?"
"They're going to find out you're not pregnant, and you're going to go back up for challenge."
"Yeah. I know."
"I might not be able to fight for your next month."
I try not to flinch, but my breath hitches anyway.
"I'm being honest with you....I will try. You know I will. But if Levi beats me again, I may not be conscious much less able to answer your challenger."
He must think I'm taking it well because I haven't said anything. Not true. I'm screaming but he can't hear. Not again. Not again.
"But I promised to protect you."
His hands tap against his leg as he talks and his words are quick. Awkward.
"So I will."
"How?"
I'm not so sure I want to know this, but I have to ask.
"If you...." He swallows. "If you have a baby....you'll be safe for almost a year."
The words rush out in a jumble like an overturned puzzle box. Fragment and obscure images of the whole.
"Where would I get a baby, Scott?"
Speaking slowly, talking rhetoric because I know exactly what he means. I just want to see if he means it. My palms are starting to sweat beneath my gloves. His gaze drops to the floor.
"From me."
The sound of his voice implodes into a black hole of soundlessness, that sucks away all notions of speech and logic. I struggle to the surface, clinging to a few words and phrases that can be used to show shock. Or is it anger....or is it fear...
"My skin--"
"I can be creative just like he can."
My hand snaps toward him, a hard slap across his jaw.
"Get out."
A hiss through my teeth. Hands twisting through my blanket, knees shaking. I press my back into the wall, blinking twice to rid my mind of past images suddenly springing to my vision.
/He doesn't know/
I repeat the words over and over again in my mind.
/He doesn't know what he's talking about. What it reminds you of. You never told them that part of the story.../
"Marie, listen....I'm not going to hurt you.--"
Exactly what they said last time.
"Don't do this."
A whisper, strained and fierce.
"If I were Logan, would you--"
"It was never like that with Logan and me!"
The look on his face tells me he had not considered that possibility.
"I've tried to think of another way out." He shakes his head.
"No choice."
"There is always a choice."
"Name it."
"I could leave."
He stares at me like I suggested running the border patrol in broad daylight ten yards from a patrol.
"How far do you think you'd get?"
"Far enough."
"No. Just no. I'm not going to have that on my hands."
"I'm not on your hands, Scott. I can't thank you enough for everything you do, but I'm not your wife or your sister or your child. You don't have to be responsible."
"I know."
He puts his hand on my shoulder, and I think it hurts him when I pull away. I know he's just trying to do what he's seen Logan do; the ruse would work better if his fingers weren't so stiff.
"But there's no one else to do it."
"I'm a free woman. I can be responsible for myself."
"If you're free, then why do you wear the veil?"
I hate it when he's right. We sit and let the silence unravel into long cords before either of us get the nerve to speak.
"Just think about it." He says, in that same apologetic tone he uses to recite the bonding formula.
"No."
"I'll be careful."
I shake my head.
"Do you hear yourself? Stop, a minute, and listen. This isn't the Scott I know. Where is the honor in this? What would the Professor think? And what would it do to Jean?"
"The Professor is dead. We left him."
It's the first time he's said it straight out. I wince, but he isn't finished.
"Jean will understand. And you talk about honor? It doesn't exist. Not here."
"You say that, and they've won. They've beaten you, and turned you into one of them. I won't believe you've given up so easily."
"Call this easy?"
His voice quivers and I wonder if there is a sheen of moisture behind the glasses. Does it condense on the lens, tears shedding tears, raining in front of his very eyes? And no one but him can see it?
"No one said it would be. But you listen to me, and you listen good. There is no use in protecting something if you forget why you're Fighting for it."
He absorbs my words, slowly. His face pale in the starlight. Translucence.
"Marie, I'm sorry."
"You don't have to apologize."
"Yes. Yes I do."
He sinks onto the bed beside me. A smattering of silence. Then a paper-thin whisper, low and ragged like a groan.
"What am I going to do if I can't get her back?"
I know that sound; Logan's voice held that same mix of terror and desperation when he came out of his nightmares. I never found what answers to give, but I learned how to put my arms around him and say nothing. So that's what I do now.
I don't mean to fall asleep; I don't. But somehow I close my eyes too long, and just like that I slip away into darkness. Into a memory, a nightmare.
/Paralysis and no defenses and pain and the inability to scream because they stuffed my gloves into my mouth....skin doesn't protect..../
No...please...let me go..
/Skull banging against the dirty cement when he slams you down, a blow to the kidneys to make you stop kicking, a curse when you catch him in the jaw.../
Logan....don't let them hurt me...
/Logan isn't there. He left you. He left you with this man and with the other two who are standing and smoking and watching. waiting in line. Logan said he didn't have a choice. That one of you had to surrender to save the others. But why couldn't it have been you? Anything would have been better than this.../
Just let me go....I won't tell anyone...I promise...please...
/He pulls your scarf away, in one brutal tug, it was the one Logan gave you for Christmas last year.... Your skull meets the cement again; this time you do it. You don't want to be awake. You just want to die. You expect them to kill you when it's over with. But they don't. Maybe that's the cruelest part. They let you live.../
"No!"
I start from bed, cold sweat plastering my shirt to my skin, arms flailing until they connect with something firm. A man's face. Hands on my shoulders. Get away from me. I won't let you this time. I'll kill myself first. I'll get it right this time.
/Marie, Marie./
The voice hides its worry, trying hard to soothe, but you can hear it quicken, mounting concern.
/It's me. Scott. Open your eyes./
I can't. I'm lost, and it's dark, and they'll find me.
/Marie, they won't find you. Not here. I won't let them, ok? Now open your eyes. Come on back to us./
Eyelids snap open; chest heaving. Scott's face hovers in front of me, tinged with worry and a bit of fear. Once he sees that I am awake, he moves back, giving me space to breathe.
"What was that?" he says.
"Nightmare."
Still gasping for breath, gotta slow it down. I'm okay now. I'm safe.
"You should tell someone. It makes it easier."
"How would you know?"
Ouch, that came out sharp. I didn't mean it that harsh.
"Because if you keep it inside, it rots. And it comes out anyway, like it did just now."
"You have no idea what I..."
"Maybe more than you think. Do you think that just because I have to hide behind these glasses that I don't see what's going on? I've listened to your other nightmares too. I've seen you try to hold it back. What are you afraid of? Me?"
"No, it's not that at all."
I stand up and tilt my face toward the window, trying to clear the blood from my head.
"It's just..."
Here goes. Might as well clean it all out at once; maybe then it won't hurt so bad. I guess he deserves this, after all he's done. He deserves the truth.
"Scott, am I a bad person?"
"You even have to ask me that?!?"
"Momma always said that whatever bad things happen to us, they are punishment for our sins. I try to think of what I've done wrong to deserve this...why else would they..."
"Nothing, Marie. Look at me. You've done nothing. You don't deserve any of this, any more than Jean does. They're the freaks. Not you."
"You wouldn't say that if you knew."
"Knew what?"
I turn my back to him, walking away.
"I'm going to check the baby."
"Marie? Knew what?"
"Never mind."
"No, I won't let you do that."
He grabs my arm. Without wearing gloves. I'm wearing long-sleeves, but the cotton is thin enough so that he can feel my skin through it. And he's not afraid?
"If you ignore it, it won't heal."
"I'm past healing, sugar."
"Look, I don't know exactly what happened, but I know that it's not your fault. No matter what they did to you, that can't change who you are-- a strong, compassionate, brave young woman who deserves a whole lot more than this place. You can trust me with it, Marie."
I believe him, yes, but I still can't look at his face when I talk. I can't even turn around.
"He left me."
"What?"
"I told you he was killed. But he wasn't. Logan left me."
Silence.
"When?"
"Six months before you found me."
Silence.
"And then what happened?"
"The same thing that's happening to Jean. More or less."
"Selfish ba-"
"Not tonight, Scott. Not anymore tonight. Please."
I'm drained; lead heavy on my feet. I don't want to say anything. I just want to lie down and close my eyes without dreams. "I just need to try to sleep again. I can't talk about it anymore now."
"Ok."
He pulls back the blankets on my bed; tugs the pillow back into place.
"I'll be right across the room. Ok?"
"Thanks."
You watch him go, then lie down, pull the blankets up to your chin despite the heat.
"Scott--"
"Yeah?"
"Don't blame him too much. He didn't think he had a choice."
"You don't have to justify him."
"But I don't have to accuse him either."
"What if he deserves it?"
"I'll decide it. Not you. Just don't hate him or anything. Okay?"
A hesitation.
"Ok. But if he ever comes here looking for you, he's going to have to come through me. I'll kill him at least once. And again if I have to. And again. You just tell me when you think it's enough."
You roll over to face the wall. Hard cement three inches from your eyes.
"Ok."
Jean's right after all, you decide. Neither you or Scott really wants to sleep. You want to ease your eyelids shut and die for a little while. Both of you.
The Phoenix Compound
October 31
"Io vorrei liberarti domattina,"
He speaks in velvet black, a sound somehow softer than the silence when he first carried her to bed. This is after he bandaged the cuts, kissed the bruises, held a smile on his face the whole time so she wouldn't see his hands shaking. The words are Italian; I recognize the lilt from World Lit class when he made us memorize poems in both English and their original languages. This wasn't one of the assigned pieces, though. I found it scribbled on the back of a card in his desk. He told me Jean had given it to him when they took their honeymoon in Venice.
I copied it when he was out on a mission; took it back to my room and read it over and over until I knew both the Italian and the English by heart. I scribbled the words on paper and taped them on the inside of my violin case.
/I would like to free you tomorrow./
"E vorrei verderti volare sui nevai come prima."
/And would like to see you fly over the snow-fields, like before./
William is sleeping. I fed him a little more than usual to keep him quiet while Scott was tending to Jean. Everyone is sleeping, except for me and him and her and it feels like we are the last people alive on the face of the earth. Us and maybe Logan, wherever he is.
I lean against the wall, my knees drawn up to cradle my violin across my thighs, and I watch them. They lie face to face, wrapped in the dark blue sheet he bought for her welcome home present. Her hands rest on either side of his face, across his bare eyelids; tonight the glasses and the visor have been carefully set aside. His eyes are closed and her eyes are closed and their fingers work slowly across every feature on the other's face, like two blind people trying to tell the colors of a painting.
I shouldn't watch; I know it. They should be alone tonight. I should lie down and pretend to sleep, but something in me can't help this. It's an ache, the kind I get when I remember that Logan was never there to do this for me. Not only because he left me. I left him too, because I knew he would try to find me and I ran from him. I hid. I lied and told myself it was never love at all, just need and desperation crammed together into small spaces. But maybe that's just what love really is, at least a part of it.
The two people across the room from me are desperate too, even though they are together again. Maybe even more now.
"Tu, cosi lontana, seppure orami cosi vicina."v
/You, so far away, even though by now, so near./
C'mon Scott, keep it going. You almost lost it there for a minute. Trust me, you have to be strong for her tonight. You can cry later; I'll cry with you, but tonight, you have to make her feel safe and Protected and let her know that it will never happen again. Go ahead and say it, even if it might be a lie. Especially if it might be a lie.
You know, it's funny how small life really is. Even the big things--love, honor, revenge-- can be condensed into nutshells, wrapped into extremely short sentences and then spoken as if they were mundane occurences. Example: Scott fought for Jean today. He won her back. He killed Levi.
I say "killed" not "murdered" because that is a secret between Scott and me. We knew going into the challenge that Levi wasn't going to walk away. Scott never gave him the chance to yield; he broke the man's jaw with one punch and then snapped his neck. No, we didn't plan it or discuss it ahead of time. He just knew what he had to do, and I knew that I wasn't going to try to stop him. Until this morning, I had never seen him kill a man. I almost expected pity, a momentary hesitation or prick of conscience, but what I saw was a calculated action totally devoid of emotion or thought. Like he had hardened into the same crystal as his visor.
"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita."
/And the soul departs to eternity./
That is the only thing that saddened me. I wanted him to regret it. I wanted to regret it myself. I wanted him to be able to spare his enemy's life in the name of some higher, loftier ideal. I think he wanted that too, it's just that he wanted Levi to die more. It was logic as well as gratification--- if he proved he was willing to kill, the next challengers would think very seriously before challenging for me or Jean, at least for a few months. To judge him would be to judge myself; I have killed men before, for similar reasons. And I didn't do it so neatly.
It might have scared me that we were both dispassionate killers but I saw Jean's face when Levi's body hit the dirt. I saw the smile. We are sisters, her and I, both survivors. We knew it was not truly murder; only an execution. A judgment. Scott carried out justice for us both.
"Perche cosi sei piu vicina...a illuminar la vita mia,"
/Because like this you are closer and can light my life/
Across the room, his fingers find her lips. They stumble when they hit the scar. I can tell when his hands start to tremble again. His voice is strained on the next sentence; thin and muffled like it is passing through walls. Walls he has built to keep himself together so he can hold her together.
"E l'anima se ne va verso l'eternita..."
/And the soul departs to eternity.../
I drop my eyes when his words fail him, when he can no longer remember what to say because she has started to cry. A sound like rain on sand or on the ocean: it is swallowed up by the immensity around it until it is everywhere and nowhere all at once.
My fingers skim over the strings of the violin, rubbing them until they are hot, until it leaves marks on the skin. I run my hands over every square inch of the wood, feeling the grain, the remnants of polish, then moving to caress the bow. I lift the instrument to my shoulder, tucking it firmly beneath my chin, and hold the bow in place. And I wait. But there is no sound. No melody in my head or in my fingers, and I hold the violin in place until my arms are sore but no sound comes.
There is no music.
Dancing In Rooms: Marie
It's rained for three days; the world is steam and heat, like someone has draped a wet washcloth over the world and is slowly wringing it out. But not fast enough. It is still suffocating.
Violin music and restlessness burn in the air like cheap hash.
You bend your head forward, sweat plastering your hair to the back of your neck in damp curls, your eyes are closed and you feel the music in every pore of your skin, a second kind of heat. You inhale the music, you suck it in through the nose and through the lungs. Let it get you high.
This is your graduation gift from Logan: a month of places you have never seen, riding on the back of Scooter's motorcycle with new leather gloves and a map inside your head. New Orleans. Nashville. Dallas. Phoenix. Roswell. Seattle. San Francisco. Los Angeles. And finally, the crown of it all, Santa Monica. A week of golden sun and beaches and walking outside in bare feet and bare hands. Only the sun hasn't shone since you've been there; the rain has poured and you've stayed in your room with your violin and Sarasate's "Carmen Fantasy". The audition is three days after you get back. You've had nightmares of standing up to play and finding that the music has slipped out the back door of your mind when you weren't looking.
The song ends; your fingers are ready to snap at the joints. You fall back on the bed. The skin on the back of your arms and legs sticks to the sheets. His knock at the door.
(Come in.)
The door opens and shuts; a scent of wet palm trees and damp cement floats in around him.
(Where'd you go?
Out.
Out where?
Had to get us some more money.
You fought?
Only once.
Logan, you promised. You said we had enough cash.
I wanted to make sure. And I had to get out and do something. My bones were starting to hurt from sitting still.
I don't like it. You know that.
Blame it on the rain. It's making us both crazy.)
You walk over to the dresser, and fiddle with the radio. Big band music, a disco beat, a country ballad; finally you settle on a local rock station. Acoustic guitar hums beneath the humidity. You look at him.
(So you wanna dance?)
You've never asked him before; the school prom didn't count because everyone danced and it was expected. But you need to move now, you need to move because if you don't you'll scream. This is back when something as trivial as rain and a hotel room makes you both claustrophobic. Before the two of you spent four days hiding in five square feet of space in the wall behind a washing machine.
(Yeah.)
He moves in front of you, arms sliding around your waist, thumbs coming together at the small of your back. You smile.
You dance to a song where a girl asks her man to stay with her, to come with her, wherever she's going, because she tells him it wouldn't be worth it if he didn't. Logan tells you that's how he feels. You suppose it is all right for him to say that because the song is about love and it is beautiful, but you can't get past the name. The girl called herself Ophelia. You read that story; you know where she ended up.
You don't take the time to imagine that you will one day be in the same place. Drowned and shining.
After the dance is over, he takes your hand and you walk with him through the rain to the beach and you swim in the Pacific for the last time. He picks you up at the shore; carries you into waves that surge up to his waist. You stand on his feet to keep your head above water; soaked on both sides, up and down. People stare at you both with amused disbelief. Crazy young lovers, they say, with a grin or a nod.
They are partly right. You are not lovers, but you are crazy and you are young.
The dance, in a way, never ends. It disappears for a while, but then it reappears during the days of waiting when he is trying to take you somewhere safe. You dance in all the different rooms, the clean and the filthy, the spacious and the cramped. After the first few days, no more words are need. When you feel the darkness too strongly, you hold out your hand to him and he slides his arms around your waist and you dance. Your eyes are always closed, remembering wet beaches and rain on the surf. You always see this, even when he is no longer there to dance with you, even when you are only dreaming of it.
But in the dreams it is different. Your mind can't keep hold of him, the memory of his features shifts and slides like a breeze across a lake. He dissipates, into fractured colors, into ripples, then he reforms into his familiar body, but your hands pass straight through him when you try to touch. Around his body is a shimmering.
His absence is the shimmering; loneliness gives off its own light. A dull glow that illuminates everything around her. Her hands, her clothes, the walls, the room that is hiding them.
You learn that some people, like him, like you, have to spend their whole lives dancing in those rooms because they aren't allowed to dance on the streets. You could say that the point is that they danced anyway, but you don't believe that so much anymore. You don't think they have any other choice. It's like that for people who've been locked in a small space for a long time.
You have to dance because if you don't, you go insane.
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