Burning Down the House (14 page)

The idea that she was going to return, if only as an observer, to the world that she had so narrowly escaped seemed unreal and impossible at first but slowly formed a kind of sense in her mind and she was able to encompass the thought without it entirely overwhelming her. She felt herself at some inaccessible height, above everyday occurrences, viewing her life from a tremendous distance, seeing patterns and repetitions, variations on a theme, and she felt an enormous tenderness for her tiny being, hiking up and down the mountain ranges of her experiences, tracing the shape of a steep and jagged EKG, not unlike the beating of her own irregular heart. She felt no happiness or peace or torment or anger, just an awareness that the fear she had felt on behalf of this being, herself, was a part of her life. It would never go away, she realized. No matter what she did she would carry this fear with her, so she might as well do something with it, use it, take some action. She would do what he asked. She felt a release from the lingering suffering of her nightmares and was able to fall back to sleep.

A few days later Angel drove Neva across the George Washington Bridge to New Jersey. He dropped her off a few blocks from a large midscale hotel and handed her an envelope that contained a small map with directions, the name of a woman she was supposed to ask for at the front desk, and his, Angel's, cell-phone number. She knew his number by heart from calling him so many times to arrange pickups and drop-offs for the boys, but he had written it down for her just in case. Angel was originally from Ecuador, in his early thirties, and had a wife and a young son. He had worked for Steve for nearly ten years driving and maintaining Steve's cars. But he liked big machinery, and being outside, and thought that working as a crane operator would be more interesting, exciting even, and possibly enable him to work his way up in construction, maybe to become a site manager. There was nowhere for him to go as a driver. He appreciated the work, was grateful for it, but he was tired of sitting in traffic, and his young body was getting restless. He was also concerned that being a driver would lead to too many gigs like this one, taking the nanny out to who the hell knew where and dropping her off in a sketchy neighborhood to walk alone. No one had told him what any of this was about, but he didn't like the looks of it. He was supposed to drive several blocks away and wait for an hour until he got a text from Neva to return to the pickup spot. He would listen to the radio. And worry about her. She was always reserved, but she looked especially tense now. Her jaw even more sharply angled than usual, her eyes more narrowed. Her clothes today seemed a little revealing to him, down-market for her, he thought, almost a bit trashy, which was not a word he would have ever used to describe her. He leaned against the car and watched her as she walked away from him past a strip mall toward the hotel. In the extremely high-heeled boots she was wearing, she looked like a colt learning to walk. Cars whizzing past, the faded primary colors of store signs smearing in the background. Her strong body suddenly appearing fragile to him. The sound of the highway was deafening. If he called out to her she wouldn't hear him. He got back in the car and turned on the radio.

P
OPPY WAS LYING
backward on Felix's bed, her feet on his pillow. This is kind of like an old-time psychiatrist's couch, she said, and you're the doctor.

Felix was spinning in a swivel chair at his desk.

How can I help? he asked, midspin.

I'm beyond help at this point, but you could make me feel better by telling me that I'm not crazy for not wanting to go to college.

You're not crazy. You're following your own path.

Right.

I mean it. You want to experience life.

Tell that to Steve. And to everyone at school who's waiting to hear where they got in. What a bunch of fakes. Half of them had tutors write their essays.

What kind of tutors?

People with PhDs. Geniuses who can't make enough money to live in this city without writing application essays for teenagers. There's this one philosophy professor at Columbia who helped a ton of kids, a totally brilliant scholar who charges like a million dollars an hour.

What kind of essay can a philosophy professor help them write?

Felix was tapping away at his computer, looking up Wikipedia entries on philosophers.

Poppy pointed one long leg up toward the ceiling. I don't know, she said. “Wittgenstein's Treatise on Community Service in South America.”

Felix giggled.

Who are some other philosophers? she asked, twisting her head around to see him.

Here are some, he said. Kant, Spinoza…

Okay, Poppy said, I got another: “Kant, Spinoza, and How I Made My First Billion by Creating a Website That Teaches Underprivileged Kids to Sell Handcrafted Things on Etsy.”

Poppy, you're going to make me pee. What's Etsy?

You don't need to know. What's some philosophy vocabulary?

Felix Googled the words: “Glossary of Philosophical Terms.”

Cartesian, dialectic, hermeneutics…

“Towards a Hermeneutics of Field Hockey,” said Poppy.

Felix fell off his chair in a fit of laughing.

I don't even totally get it, he said, but that's really funny.

Maybe I should do comedy. Stand-up.

Stand-up? Like Louis C.K.?

How do you know Louis C.K.? That's terrifying. You're too young to know Louis C.K.

Felix was back at the computer already, showing her YouTube clips of Louis C.K.

He's really good, Poppy said, but it's too depressing to do stand-up. I couldn't handle it. The humiliation. What if nobody laughs?

Oh, everybody would laugh at you, said Felix.

Thanks, I think.

Felix smiled. I meant with you. Not at you.

No, you didn't, but I forgive you.

Felix became absorbed in some entry online. Poppy circled her ankles in the air.

This guy seems smart, said Felix.

Who? Plato? We read
The Allegory of the Cave
in history. That was cool.

No, his name is M-A-I-M-O-N-I-D-E-S.

Never heard of him.

Poppy rolled onto her stomach. Her hair had grown since the summer and swung below her chin, with straight short bangs that she had cut across her forehead. Her wide eyes sparkled when she spoke to Felix, but at any lull in the conversation the sparkles wavered and faded and went dim.

He wrote a book called
The Guide for the Perplexed,
said Felix.

I could use that.

He says that evil isn't real. It is a lack. It's the nonpresence of good.

It doesn't feel that way, said Poppy.

He's right though. Listen to this:

“Yet every fool imagines that the world exists only for his sake, as though no other being existed outside of him. But if he meets with the opposite of what he wanted, he decides that all Being is bad. However, if he were to contemplate and understand all Being and recognize the insignificance of his share in it, then the truth would become obvious to him.”

Okaaay…, said Poppy, so you're saying if I'm upset I'm just being self-absorbed.

Basically. Listen:

“The right way of looking at things consists in seeing the totality of existing mankind…as of no importance to the interdependence of all Being.”

I think what he's saying is that I'm a spoiled brat.

He's saying that most of us are.

Gee that makes me feel better.

It should.

Maybe it should but it doesn't.

Maybe it will. Eventually.

Poppy felt a bright sharp pang behind her eyes and then the tears came falling. Maybe, she said, hiding her face in another pillow. In a muffled voice she said, How did you get to be so smart? And why I am I so stupid? The thing about evil is it doesn't feel like a lack it feels like pain. Her wet red eyes stared at Felix. It doesn't feel like something I can just think out of existence.

Felix was kneeling by the bed now, his small hand on her arm.

What is it? he asked. Is this just about college?

No, it's more than that. It's something a lot worse and I don't want to talk about it. She sobbed, gulping, desperate, desolate sobs. He kept his hand on her arm.

Maybe you need a life goal, he said.

Maybe I need a life.

Poppy, it isn't all that bad.

Well, what's your life goal?

I have a new one, he said, his compassionate expression suddenly changed to a look of secret excitement.

What is it? Poppy sniffled, drying her eyes with the corner of the pillowcase.

I want to invent a new color.

Poppy's pretty brow wrinkled into a series of loving apostrophes. Oh Felix, you're amazing, she said, hugging him. But I'm not like you, she whispered over his shoulder, her lips quivering. I'm just not. I'm not a philosopher or a mystic and it would never occur to me to create a new color. She squeezed her eyes shut. Can you even do that?

Sure, he said pragmatically. First I have to invent a new substance. So light can reflect off of it in a new way.

Poppy sighed. Her face was expressionless, exhausted, but utterly beautiful, even more beautiful because she had no idea how beautiful she was in this moment. Her gigantic blue eyes gazed out through the window, over the townhouses, over the buildings, over the rivers, but saw nothing. She pressed her arms around Felix tightly. I wish I had hope like you do, she said.

He held on to her. His little face was stoic, unwavering.

It's okay, he said.

No it isn't, she said.

Yes it is, he said. It's okay.

In the coming days Felix can tell that something is wrong, that Poppy seems to have slipped out of herself, into an artfully concealed madness that only he notices. He knows nothing about what's been going on with Ian or about what has happened recently between them, but Felix senses some change, suspects something in Poppy's air of strangeness, her manner of weird composure tilting into distraction and then teetering on the edge of performance. She is unusually, animatedly, interested in trivial concerns—what Felix had for breakfast, where Roman has misplaced his hockey stick—and detached from the issues that would normally merit her energetic response, such as an impossible-not-to-overhear argument between Patrizia and Steve vibrating from their bedroom while Poppy and the boys watch television in the entertainment room or the announcement that Jonathan and Miranda are going to have a baby. She's become a spectator of her own life, as if it were an accident unfolding slowly before her eyes. Felix feels a terror taking over, but he can't quite identify it. All he knows is that Poppy is in danger and that he is witnessing a profound unhappiness he has never before encountered. He tries to talk to her but she can't keep up her end of the conversation. She goes off on tangents, non sequiturs, charming free-associative remarks that make him smile but also frighten him. He considers discussing this situation with an adult but is unsure if anyone would believe him. They have often dismissed his obscure ideas. The only person who seems a likely candidate for his confession is Neva, and she too is distracted, absorbed, although in a way that appears to him less dangerous than simply distanced. He would tell Neva if the right moment arose, but it hasn't. They are always rushing to school, from school, to activities, from events, and the conversations they used to have are now less confidential, more perfunctory, businesslike. He thinks that being around his family has turned Neva into a businesswoman. And made Poppy go insane.

This is what she did, what it was like. She didn't sleep at all or she slept until two in the afternoon, missing classes and pretending to be sick. She drank. She has never liked liquor but now when the house is empty—it is never entirely empty, there is always someone working, cleaning, rearranging, but when nobody is nearby—she opens the mirrored liquor cabinet and tries different drinks, based on their colors, their semiprecious hues. On the days she does leave the house to go to school she skips classes, takes the subway downtown or to Brooklyn, smokes cigarettes—she has never really enjoyed cigarettes—until they burn not only her fingertips but her lips. She sells quite a few of her most expensive clothes, for the feeling of selling her clothes. She goes out with friends and drinks and smokes cigarettes. At the same time! She thinks: Two things I hate but I am doing anyway! Actually three! She meets boys from other schools, boys she has never met before. And she meets men, the kind of men who are on the lookout for girls her age, or a little older, for she looks older when she gets dressed up to go out. She wears her hair messy, a tank top under some stylish blazer or sequined jacket that she will take off when she sits down before casually, immodestly reaching across the table, or the bar or the sofa if she is in a bar or a lounge or club with a sofa, and revealing her pretty lacy colorful bra beneath her tank top. She puts on sheer black tights or no stockings at all and when she does wear stockings there is usually a discreet rip someplace. She sports a tight skirt or leather pants. Her accessories telegraph that she has money, and her movements explain that she has knowledge. She is affectionate, especially with the girls with whom she travels. She slings her arms around them and they all lunge forward, laughing without really smiling. She rummages in her bag for another cigarette and spills credit cards on the floor and has to bend over to pick them up. She feels ridiculous but continues to behave this way. She thinks that this must be what it feels like to be a true teenager, that she is very successfully impersonating a teenager. She never really felt like one before, always wise beyond her years, or at least sophisticated if not wise, and now she has decided to be stupid, just the way she was supposed to be during high school while instead she was too busy being a snob to really play with the other kids, when she was too caught up in her sophisticated sadness to make a mess with them. Now she puts aside her eccentricities, her interests, her feelings, and chooses to drown with the others in an ultra-premium-vodka puddle, striped with shivering colored lights that make her think of fuel rods at Fukushima, a radioactive rainbow wriggling beneath her feet as she trips out of the restaurant onto the sidewalk into a waiting car. She dances with people who exist somewhere on a spectrum between friends and strangers, but not acquaintances, these nonrelationships feel more intense than that, something like estranged cousins reunited at the end of the world. That is what their revelry is most like, that of a merry band of distant relatives who have put aside their animosities, their petty differences, and even hatred, to join in a frenzied celebration on the last night of the universe or more likely the first night after the end, survivors gathered to remind themselves that they are alive. A writhing necklace of silhouetted figures joined in some macabre gavotte across the rooftops of the burned-out buildings and through the dusty abandoned parks of an uninhabitable, previously unimaginable, city.

When the psychiatrist had told her that they were all living post-apocalypse, Poppy hadn't understood what that meant. Now she gets it. Poppy constructs her world in terms of pre-Ian and during-Ian and post-Ian and post-Ian is the same as post-apocalypse. This isn't, she feels, necessarily a bad thing. It is an organizing principle and a time-management tool. And anyway she can't really remember in her booze-fueled and pill-enhanced brain—yes, she has started to mix the two, an ingenious suggestion made by her latest private-equity semi-boyfriend—what life was like before or even during Ian. The blurry present annihilates all happy memories. But sometimes an image breaks through and she remembers a distant and shimmering good fortune—what must have been an ordinary moment at the time, a walk along the river with her mother that now takes on a pure brilliance. Light falling on the rippling Hudson in a cascade of transparency, a vivid nothingness sparkling silently and moving continuously and reflecting a meaning and mystery beyond naming. Her mother a presence beside her that stood for solace, consolation, the coalescence of everything safe. Poppy understands that this memory may just be a figment, a fantasy. But does it matter?

Where is Ian in her thoughts? He's a figment too, a fantasy, already disintegrating like dissolving ice caps, floating wads of frozen lake separating, drifting apart, their melting patterns revealing memories trapped in memories now sliding into the sea of the past. This is going to be a slow process. She hears ice crack, echoing in an isolated valley. The reformation of her interior world. No sign yet of life in the cold water. No arctic flower seed fossilized under centuries of frost, waiting to be reborn. Not yet. Something—her soul?—trudges across the white landscape, her shadow spanning miles across the snow. A pale walking stick curved like the horn of a woolly mammoth plunges into the crisp powder. Footsteps, the thudding swish of an animal-skin cape, the walking stick breaking the surface, the inner warrior traveling through the inner landscape. The arctic flower buried at the icy peak of a distant mountain.