Brainfire Read Free Page B

pebbles misshapen by tides, smoothed by the comings and goings of oceans. No. They aren’t my hands. How could they be? She was a young girl. Sixteen, seventeen. How old? How old? These could not be her hands.
    She turned her face away from Domareski. There was a white window, windblown snow. The train—but she couldn’t remember stepping onto the train, or being carried; visions, dreams, remembered fragments of motion. Who could ever be sure?
    â€œRelax,” Domareski said. He was standing over her. He held his black bag under his arm, clutched to his side.
    â€œI want to see Aaron,” she said. It was not her own voice, it hadn’t come out the way she had wanted it; it was deeper, old, infirm.
    Aaron. She saw a hand rise in the air and watched it flutter slightly—a bulbous hand, gnarled—and then it fell to her side again, as if she were ashamed of it. The young girl, the old love: they were things trapped in photographs, ancient daguerreotypes, deceits. None of it had ever happened. There hadn’t ever been an Aaron, a child.
    She turned her head to look at the Physician. I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. He was trying to tell her that. She could hear the words.
    â€œDid you ask about my visa?” she said.
    â€œYes—”
    She looked toward the window. Dark smoke, blown from the front of the train, whipped through the swirling snow. The visa, he was trying to tell her: I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.
    â€œPlease,” he said. “Don’t try to sit up. Later. Not now.”
    â€œWhat about the visa?” she said.
    â€œI promise,” he said. “It’s a matter of clarifying things with Comrade Sememko, that’s all.”
    She shut her eyes, thinking it strange that Domareski’s medication caused her to feel an absence of herself—as if the physical body no longer existed and you became a creature composed entirely of mind and nothing else. It’s a matter of clarifying things with Comrade Sememko . But the Physician was lying to her again. She opened her eyes, thinking of how the snowy light hurt her, and looked at him. But he was busy, pretending to be busy, with the clasp of his bag.
    â€œPeople don’t always need to do what they’re told,” she said. “Don’t you understand that? There’s a point you reach when …”
    â€œYes.” He opened the bag, looked inside, snapped it shut. “You should sleep now. Please.”
    Sleep? What good to her was sleep? It was a kind of dying, losing your hold on things, slipping and sliding down a slope at the foot of which there lay darkness. She didn’t want that dark; she wanted light, remembrance, rooms filled with sun and warmth, a memory of seeing Aaron walk through the pines with the baby in his arms. But why now did these seem like the memories of another person?
    She could feel her eyelids close. She could hear Domareski turn from the bed toward the door, the slight noise made as he slid the door open, then shut it behind him. Alone. Clackclacketyclack . A white wilderness. She pressed her hands together, appalled by the way they felt to her. She thought: Don’t. Don’t feel them. They aren’t a part of you.
    She turned on her side, face toward the wall.
    Aaron—but Aaron was dead. She remembered—when? dear God, when had this happened?—she remembered taking a pair of scissors and cutting a wedge of material from a garment, the insignia of widowhood. A tiny triangular space, an absence. Yes. Dead. And you are not a young girl, you are not sixteen, seventeen, whatever, married, married to Aaron, you are an old woman, an old woman twisted by pain and racked by remembrances and scared of—
    hua tse-ling
    a soldier, a young man, hua tse-ling, he had come across the ice in his heavy overcoat
    I made him do it. It was me, she thought. I brought him.
    please please don’t there’s such pain such a blinding