INTERZONE 253 JUL-AUG 2014 (12 page)

“Yes,” he said. He felt Tibbi next to him. She had just had a growth spurt, but was not tall enough to see into the coffin. Blankenship reached out to his wife – something he hadn’t actually done that day – and pulled off her veil. He looked at her face.

He couldn’t tell if it was his Zhorah, or the Zhorah he saw today. The ache rose, and almost choked him. His Zhorah died, and now didn’t exist. “My wife is gone from us forever,” he said to the light stick.

Dr Reed lowered the light. “It’s fine to be sad,” she said. “You should be sad about that.”

He hadn’t told Tibbi yet that there was a Zhorah in this universe. He never wanted to tell her. “Maybe we just need to forget,” he said. “Start over somewhere else.”

“You haven’t been able to even look at what happened to you yet,” Dr Reed said. She leaned forward, ready to tap his knee. “Do you need your safe place?”

“No,” he said. “I think I’m all right.”

“That’s wonderful, Mr Blankenship,” Dr Reed said. “I think we made some progress today.”

SESSION SEVEN

Tibbi stayed home from school, so he stayed home from work. But she wouldn’t let him miss his therapy appointment. “I’ll be OK, Baba,” she said, from her bed.

“Are you eating junk?”

“No,” she said. “I’m eating OK. I’m eating what you eat.”

“It’s stress then,” he said. He sat down next to his daughter and stroked her hair. She laid her head in his lap like she did when she was little. “Maybe staying here isn’t a good idea.” He knew it wasn’t, but he wanted to introduce the idea gently to her. She’d weathered so much already. “We could start over. Anyplace you want.”

Tibbi opened her blue and brown eyes and blinked at him. “None of them are home, though.”

“I know,” he said.

Tibbi let him pet her hair a few more times. Then she rolled over onto her stomach and stuck out her long, birdy legs. She had Zhorah’s eyes and Zhorah’s body. “It’s OK, Baba. We’re lucky. We could have ended up in a place with no gravity. Or sunlight. There are an infinite number of multiverses.” She looked up at him. “We could have ended up nowhere at all.”

“Where did you hear about all that?” he asked. “Multiverses?”

“I read about them at school,” she said. “I looked it up in the library.” She turned her face into the pillow. Her hair, just like his hair, reddish-brownish like the bark of a tree, spread on the pillow. She was muffled, but Blankenship could still hear. “We’re awful lucky.”

Blankenship resigned to patting his daughter on the shoulder. “We sure are, precious,” he said. “We sure are. Sip your soda.” He’d brought her a few cans of soda and was letting them go warm and flat. “I’ll be back in a few hours.” He stood up. “Bring me those multiverse books when you get a chance. I’d like to see them.”

“OK, Baba,” Tibbi said into the pillow.

A slim box lay on his chair when he got to the appointment. He sat down and turned it over in his hands.

“It’s for you,” she said.

He was afraid of it for some reason, and said so.

“I help people pick open their lives,” she explained. “I have seen how powerful meaningful coincidences are.”

Inside, wrapped in a sheet of tissue paper, was Dr Reed’s distracting scarf. Zhorah’s death veil. He pulled it out and held it open.

“You said you and your daughter had nothing from your old life,” Dr Reed said.

“Thank you,” he said. He didn’t know what else to say, so he didn’t say anything else. He balled the scarf into a hand, and then stuffed the hand in his pocket. He squeezed it. He felt better and worse.

“Tell me what you’re feeling,” Dr Reed said.

“I feel happy,” he said. “And sadder than ever. I feel confused. And lost.” The silk of the scarf was cool and slippery. “More lost than ever.”

“Like you still don’t know your place?”

He nodded. He longed, suddenly, for the light stick. Something to focus on besides Dr Reed’s face. He was seeing her now as Evelyn Meridian, the psychiatric researcher that lived next door to their little, white cottage. In his universe, her wife’s name was Rita. Rita was a painter. She and Zhorah had been good friends. They’d collaborated on a few illustrated poems before Zhorah’s car accident. Evelyn and Rita had been over the house for dinner so many times. They watched Tibbi so he and Zhorah could have nights out.

He closed his eyes.

“What do you think will help you find your place?” Evelyn Meridian/Reed asked.

SESSION EIGHT

Dr Reed gave him more homework. Not a worksheet, though, and not to practice going to his safe place in his mind. She wanted him to visit places, real places, which meant something to him.

No place in this universe really did.

He didn’t remember which corner he and Tibbi appeared on, and wasn’t sure he wanted to remember. He passed the hospital where they were treated on his way to therapy, and they still lived at the motel. The metalworkers’ union hall where he worked didn’t feel particularly special, except that he spent thirty hours a week there. And Tibbi rarely wanted to eat at the same restaurant twice but instead try everything in this Seattle.

That left Ferguson’s.

Ferguson had just come home when Blankenship walked up. His car, a black sporty-looking deal – Blankenship approved – was in the driveway with the trunk open. And Ferguson was ferrying packages back and forth into his kitchen.

Blankenship watched him for awhile. Like he expected, Ferguson ignored him. Then, Blankenship took the long way to his appointment.

“I didn’t know what to say to him,” Blankenship told Dr Reed.

“To yourself,” she said. She still thought this was all a metaphor.

“To this myself,” he said.

Dr Reed just started up the light stick when the receptionist with the ombré hair knocked firmly on the office door, then stuck her head all the way in to the neck. “I’m sorry to disturb your session, Dr Reed,” she said, “but there’s a phone call for Mr Blankenship. It’s his daughter’s school.”

Blankenship’s field of vision narrowed to a tube. The phone at the front desk was warm, the mouthpiece a little damp. He made a hello sound.

“Mr Blankenship? This is Annie Tompkins. I’m the nurse at Seward Middle School. Your daughter was having severe abdominal pain, so we’ve called an ambulance. Do you have a hospital preference?”

He said the name of the hospital where they’d been first treated. It was the only one he knew by name, and it was just around the corner. He was surprised he didn’t scream. “I will meet you there,” he said. Then, he hung up.

Dr Reed took one look at his face. “Mary,” she said to the receptionist. “Cancel my afternoon appointments.” She stepped forward and took Blankenship firmly by the arm. It was something Evelyn Meridian would do. “I’m going with you.”

The hospital was a blur. Emergency directed them to Pediatrics, and Pediatrics had them sit in the waiting room. The walls were painted with colorful animals, ostensibly to cheer up the children in the ward. But the artist hadn’t paid much attention to the animals’ eyes. Some were wall- or cross-eyed. Others seemed to be starting off into a distance at nothing at all.

Blankenship didn’t know how long they sat there, until a physician came out, clipboard and white coat and all, and called Blankenship’s name. He took them into a small office. One wall was lined with stuffed animals in improbable colors: raccoons, bears, cats, even an armadillo. They all watched Blankenship with shiny, sharp glass eyes.

He didn’t know which was worse. The mural animals or these.

“Tibbi has Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney Disease,” the doctor said. “It’s genetic. Have you or your wife ever been diagnosed?”

Blankenship shook his head.

“It only takes one gene. Sometimes, there are no symptoms at all.”

“Is she OK?” he asked.

The doctor nodded. “She’ll need treatment. I have forms for you to sign. We’d like to give her dialysis today.”

“But she’ll be OK?” he asked.

“She’ll need to eat a special diet. Drink more water than she has. Regular dialysis. And she’ll need to be monitored.” The doctor held out a paper with numbers on it. “Her GFR is high.”

“GFR?”

“Measures renal function,” the doctor explained.

“Is there a cure?” Dr Reed said.

“No,” the doctor said. “There’s no cure. But we’d like to start testing today to see if either of you are a donor match.” The doctor leaned in. “I know it’s a lot to take in. But we should have everything set up in case she needs a new kidney, and living donors are preferable to cadavers.”

“I’m her father,” Blankenship said. “Why wouldn’t I be a match?”

“Some relatives aren’t,” the doctor said. “Tissue, blood type, immune function. Can be tricky. But one of you should be a good candidate.”

He thought Dr Reed was Zhorah. “She isn’t her mother,” Blankenship said.

“But I’d like to be tested, anyway,” Dr Reed said. “I’m a friend of the family.”

“Can I see her?” Blankenship asked. He wanted to see his daughter immediately. He wanted to see her eyes – Zhorah’s eyes – and get away from all these blank animals.

“Of course,” the doctor said. He led them down a hallway. Dr Reed stood outside as Blankenship went in.

Tibbi looked so small, lost on the hospital bed. Tubes led from her arms and nose to the wall. Blankenship moved the tubes aside to hold his daughter.

“Baba,” she sobbed.

“It’s OK, precious,” he said. “Baba will fix it. Baba will get you everything you need.” He sang into her hair, about streetlights, and talk on the TV, and the bars of Orion.

They hadn’t noticed Dr Reed had come in and sat down.

“What are the bars of Orion?” Tibbi asked. She wiped her eyes on a corner of the sheet.

“Orion’s a constellation,” Dr Reed said.

Tibbi looked at Dr Reed. “Evelyn?” she asked. Her mouth fell open.

Dr Reed raised her eyebrows at being called Evelyn. “Hello, Tibbi,” she said. “I have heard a lot about you too.”

SESSION NINE

He wasn’t a good match. Neither was Dr Reed. Tibbi would be placed on a transplant list once her GFR hit about twenty five milliliters per minute.

“We can just sit and talk today,” Dr Reed said.

“No,” he said. “I need to face this target stuff.” He had to face it so he could face whatever came next. He’d prepared a little. Tibbi’s teacher brought her books to the motel so Tibbi could catch up on homework, and had included the book on Introductory M-Verse Theory.

“All right,” Dr Reed said. She held out the light stick. “Watch the light. Imagine the target event. Be there. Talk to me about what you feel.”

It’d been a regular day. Blankenship always imaged that the end of the world – the end of the universe – would have some sort of sign, a warning at least. But the sky was clear and Tibbi was late for school, as usual. He had a deadline that afternoon, for a review on a movie he couldn’t even remember the plot of right after watching, much less now. So, he had the time to walk Tibbi to school, which she wasn’t crazy about but allowed him to do, as long as he peeled off a block from the edge of the ball field.

They walked, and talked about something, then something else, and he offered to help Tibbi hold her enormous schoolbag at least once. But then, he got a chill, and she must have too, because she didn’t shake off his hand.

The sky turned black in an instant. Not black like night, but black like wrong. The sidewalk rolled beneath them, like a wave of water. He thought it was an earthquake, or the long dormant volcano they called Mount Bydell had come to life. He jumped on his daughter. He knocked her onto the ground, and he folded himself around her. He covered as much of her as he could. She screamed into his chest, and he held onto the top of her head. Wind whipped dust, then gravel, then straight up debris which bounded and scraped his back. It carried away her school bag.

He looked up only once. He looked up to see all the houses on the street, the yards, sidewalks, streetlights, everything, break and fold and then disappear, leaving on grey smoke. He looked up to see everything swallowed, and he turned his face into his daughter’s hair and waited for them to be taken too.

But they weren’t.

The wind turned way down to a breeze, and the crashing turned to car horns, a distant drilling, and the swishing of legs around them. He stayed over his daughter until they were shouted at, and then pulled apart. Someone called emergency services. They filled in the blanks. Father and daughter attacked, beaten, mugged, and left on a street corner. He and Tibbi were placed into an ambulance.

Blankenship held out the book to Dr Reed. “‘Everything that exists and can exist exists in some possible universe,’” he quoted from the first chapter. “Our universe was destroyed and we wound up in this one.”

She turned off the light stick and took the book from him.

“I don’t know why,” he said.

“You don’t know your place,” she said. She seemed to understand now what he’d meant.

“Exactly,” he said. “I don’t know what I am supposed to do.”

Evelyn Reed placed the light stick on top of the book. “Your place is with your daughter,” she said. “You’re supposed to be here for her. To do whatever it takes.”