The World Gives Way: A Novel Read online

  Maybe Charlotte hadn’t sensed this similar absence yet with her mother. Lord knew Imogene hadn’t been sleeping in the same bed with her. But eventually some hard feeling would embed itself in her, some deep-down subcutaneous sense that something was missing, something irretrievable. Myrra hoped the world would be gone before Charlotte was able to recognize it.

  That night Myrra woke up suddenly, in that way whereby the eyes stay shut and the body stays still, but consciousness is suddenly alive and whirring. Without willing it, she pictured Imogene jumping off the balcony, her terrified expression. Fear washed over her body. Don’t think about this. Don’t think about it. But there was nothing else to think about, not while lying awake in the dark.

  With her eyes still closed, she started tallying the days that had passed, the days she had left. It reminded her of waking up before her shift started at the laundry, waking up at four, realizing that she had an hour left to sleep. An hour left to sleep, two months left to live. Minus what, two days? How many weeks in a month, how many days, how many minutes? It might not even be two months—it could happen tomorrow. Myrra thought of an egg cracked on the floor, a soufflé deflating. Imogene’s shattered skull. The whole world was that fragile. It was difficult to breathe. The blanket was too heavy—there wasn’t enough air in the room. Her head hurt—the whiskey.

  The body was mostly water. Myrra had learned that somewhere. When her body was frozen in space, would it feel like ice? Eyeballs are especially watery. Would they shatter? Myrra pictured her body floating, frozen shards of her eyeballs floating, drifting slowly away from the rest of her. She turned over in bed and squeezed her eyelids tighter in response to the thought. She pulled her knees in to her chest.

  Where was Charlotte? She needed to check on Charlotte. Somehow Myrra never pictured her dying, not the way she pictured herself dying. Maybe that’s why she was having so much trouble letting go of her. Myrra walked over to the bassinet. Charlotte must have been kicking in a dream; her legs were snared and tangled in the tiny blanket. Myrra delicately freed her limbs from the fabric, rested her hand on Charlotte’s sleeping foot. Every part of her skin radiated heat, practically glowing. Myrra wondered where all that heat went. Everything in the universe was moving steadily from hot to cold, Jake had told her that once.

  Charlotte furrowed her brow in her sleep, making Myrra’s heart skip. When Imogene and Marcus had first brought Charlotte home from the hospital, her face had been scrunched up just like that. Her face stayed scrunched up and angry long after. She cried constantly. Myrra thought this was an entirely logical response to being ejected from the warmth of a mother’s womb, but Imogene was annoyed. She and Marcus hired a photographer to come in a week after the birth, but ultimately the photo session had to be rescheduled because Charlotte wouldn’t stop crying. Imogene eventually handed the baby off to Myrra, and she and Marcus took the photographer aside to negotiate a new appointment time.

  Myrra had walked Charlotte around the room ten or twelve times, bouncing her and spinning her and singing to her, before she finally stopped wailing. Even then, her face stayed puckered in a grimace. Myrra was still walking her around, cooing to her, when Imogene walked back over.

  “I hope her face doesn’t stay like that,” Imogene had said. “She looks like a tortoise.”

  With that she waltzed out of the room, off to a gym appointment. Marcus disappeared upstairs into his study. And Myrra and Charlotte were alone again. It was the first time Myrra had been left alone with the baby, the first of many, many times to come.

  “You keep that face as long as you want,” Myrra had said, and continued bouncing her. “No one asks to be born. I think you’re allowed to be a little indignant.”

  Charlotte had mashed her face into Myrra’s shoulder, rubbing her eyes back and forth against the fabric of Myrra’s dress. Myrra remembered her chest swelling with love, tears almost immediately welling up in her eyes. You’re mine, she had thought.

  In the dark of the hotel room, Myrra continued to caress Charlotte’s foot. There were deeper reasons why she couldn’t let Charlotte go, beyond just the panic of the moment. Charlotte stirred and Myrra pulled her hand away, suddenly anxious that she might wake her.

  The room was too cramped, too hot. Myrra looked to the balcony doors. They still scared her, but she needed air. She walked out into the coolness of the night and paced along the stone floor. Tonight the sea was calm. There was a full moon; the sky was riddled with stars. Artificial moon, artificial stars. Were they light bulbs? The water glittered below. This was beautiful, but it wasn’t enough to live on. In her plans, Myrra hadn’t thought much past getting to Nabat. It was so much harder to know how to live when you knew the immediacy of your death.

  Charlotte hadn’t wanted to be born. Through the labor of her years Myrra had often felt the same way. She felt another jolt of adrenaline at the thought of her own death, the picture again of her own body frozen and drifting in the dark. She stopped pacing for a moment to grip the rail. Her skin stretched taut over the white bones of her knuckles.

  She wondered if this was how Imogene had felt, if she had been alone in the dark on a balcony, thinking just a little too hard. She wondered how a person could both not want to have been born and not want to die at the end.

  A flicker of movement caught her eye, a pinprick of orange light in the dull dark glow of the moon. Someone was on the balcony adjacent to hers, smoking a cigarette. She could see their silhouette now that she was looking properly. The small dot of orange glowed brighter as the dark figure brought the cigarette to their lips and drew in the smoke.

  “Hello?” she called out. Her greeting echoed over the stone.

  “Hello?” a young man’s voice replied. She recognized it. Sem, the concierge. The dark figure of Sem moved toward the balcony door, reached out, and fumbled along the wall. The light on his balcony flickered on, and Sem, now fully illuminated, squinted at her.

  “Emily?” he called out.

  “Hello!” she replied. She was overwhelmingly relieved to have another human being to interact with. Myrra turned and closed the curtains to the room before turning on her own light. The balconies were about six meters apart, but now, with a little illumination, she could see Sem very clearly. She imagined looking back at this spot from some vantage point far out in the middle of the water: two adjacent glowing specks high up on the black cliff.

  “Do you live in the hotel as well?” she called out.

  “No, my dad and I live down the road there—” He waved his arm vaguely at a cluster of staircases going down the cliff. “But I like to take advantage of empty rooms every now and again. Living with your parents gets cramped.”

  “How long has your father owned this hotel?” Myrra asked, more as an excuse to keep talking than from actual interest.

  “It’s been in my family since the start… My great-grandfather commissioned it, I guess, when the world was still being built.” Sem looked down idly at the cigarette between his fingers and tapped away the ash. He didn’t seem to find his birthright very interesting, and Myrra couldn’t help judging him for all that he took for granted. Myrra had no heirlooms or stories of her ancestry. The only thing she had of her mother’s was her cheap little plastic statue. Myrra pictured it tucked away inside her old mattress and regretted again leaving it behind. But maybe that was how life was supposed to go—a person shouldn’t have to think about family or future or possessions. They were meant to exist as a given. Maybe being young meant it was OK to ignore these things, indulge in selfishness. This was what allowed for progress and identity. Myrra had been denied this, but that didn’t mean it was the wrong way to be.

  Sem fidgeted with his nails, cigarette hanging limp from his bottom lip. An awkward silence had taken hold of the conversation. The wind kicked up from the sea below, whooshing around her head and tangling her hair.

  Sem said something to her, but the wind made it difficult to hear.

  “What?” Myrra shouted at him, th
en flinched at her own volume. Charlotte could wake up.

  Sem smiled and shouted louder. “I’d kill to be doing what you do,” he said. “Traveling around—”

  Another gust of wind rushed past her ears, and she lost the rest of what he said. But she heard just enough to feel the irony in his words.

  Sem waved at her and tried again. “Do you want to just come over here?” Sem called out. “It’s hard to hear—”

  Myrra looked sideways at the balcony door. She would, if not for Charlotte.

  “I can’t,” she shouted back. “The baby’s asleep.”

  Sem nodded.

  “I could come over there,” he called out. He had a sort of mischievous look on his face. Myrra hadn’t lived much, but she knew when someone was propositioning her.

  But maybe that wasn’t a bad thing either. Just minutes before, she’d been panicked and gripping the balcony rail. Sem offered mostly empty conversation, but all this nothing had a calming effect. She just needed to get out of her head for a while. And if Charlotte had slept through all this shouting, she’d stay asleep even if Myrra brought in company.

  “OK, but don’t be too loud when you knock on the door!”

  “Got it!” Sem gave her a look as if he’d just won at cards. He stubbed out his cigarette on the stone and disappeared inside. Myrra stayed out for a moment longer, losing feeling of herself as the wind roared louder around her. The sea had been so quiet a second ago.

  She stepped inside and closed the balcony door with a quiet click. She could hear Charlotte’s heavy breathing, a slight whistle to it. As promised, the knock on the door was so soft that Myrra barely heard it. When she opened the door, Sem held up a few miniature bottles of whiskey and waved them in the air.

  “Just in case you’re running low—on the house,” he whispered, and walked past her into the dark room. She noticed again how tall he was. Lanky and tall, with limbs that swung around in wide arcs.

  The suite had a seating area off the main bedroom with two plush armchairs and a couch, separated by a glass door. Here, just as in the bedroom, there were windows with a sea view. The glass had a warped old-world quality to it that appealed to her. She could still hear the wind distantly outside. Myrra lit a dim lamp and grabbed a couple of glasses off a small corner bar. She sat down in a chair, where she made sure she could see Charlotte’s bassinet through the door.

  Sem flopped onto the spot on the couch nearest to Myrra’s chair. The casualness with which he moved about made her uneasy, as if it were his own living room. Sem poured whiskey into the two glasses and handed one to her.

  “So why are you awake right now?” he asked.

  “It’s been a strange few days for me,” she said, not knowing if that was really an answer to his question.

  “What’s been strange?”

  Myrra wanted to really talk to someone, but she had to think about how much to reveal, how much could be couched in a lie. She took a sip of whiskey, a more delicate Marcus-style sip this time. Her head still swam from the drinks she’d had before.

  “A lot. A lot of change. A lot of death,” she said finally.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sem said. He paused between words, stumbled over what to say, unable to come up with a better response.

  “It’s all right. It’s hard to tell yet, but I think I might be better off now than I was before.” Sem looked confused, but Myrra didn’t know how to explain further without going into detail. She looked to her side, through the glass door, to check on Charlotte’s bassinet. All was still quiet.

  “Your daughter is beautiful,” Sem said, following her look.

  “Thank you. But she’s not my daughter. A friend of mine died and left me to look after her.” A convenient narrative, and he seemed to buy it. Charlotte looked nothing like her, after all.

  “What about you?” she asked, shifting the conversation away from herself. “What are you doing up this late?”

  “My shift at the front desk ended at midnight, but I’ve always been an insomniac, so I figured I would just hole up in one of the rooms, grab some drinks, and watch the sunrise.” He waggled his head a little as he talked, and his lips curled up in a way that Myrra had to admit was charming.

  “Alone?”

  “Most of my friends left town when we graduated. One of the reasons why I want to head to New London. But there are still folks I hang out with, mostly hotel employees. René, he’s the porter, he gets a bunch of us together on Friday nights to play poker.”

  “I used to play cards at my old job.” In the laundry, in the dorms. “We used to play snap. You ever played snap?”

  Sem smiled bigger, a little less suavely and a little more genuinely. “Yeah—I played that with my sister.”

  “We used to bet on snap,” Myrra continued, “and at one point I picked up a duplicate deck and started cheating to win hands. I made some good money for a while.”

  “Did you ever get caught?” Sem asked.

  “Yeah, eventually. We stopped playing after that.” This was an understatement. A few of the other women had blackened both her eyes and given her a nasty welt on the side of her rib cage.

  Sem looked at her for a long, silent moment. He had such a nervous, adolescent energy. He wants to kiss me, she thought. It was a good thought. Or at least a distracting thought.

  Then wind rattled the windows, making Myrra jump up from her chair. For a second she thought maybe the world was finally shaking apart.

  Sem stood up alongside her, concerned. “Are you OK?”

  She stole a look out the window. A dusting of stars shone through the glass; there were no cracks in the sky that she could see. “Sorry—the wind is just very loud. Is it always this loud?”

  “It picks up really suddenly out here, since we’re so close to the water,” he said, and took a step toward her. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

  He reached out and placed a hand on her arm, left it there and stood quietly, questioningly. She was so amped up that the touch of another person made electrodes crackle and snap on her skin. Not entirely a bad sensation, but a frenzied one.

  He was still holding a glass in his other hand, so loose and casual against his hip that Myrra was sure it was going to slip out of his grip and shatter on the floor. She thought of the price of the glass. It looked expensive.

  His hand was firm and warm. Myrra tried to imagine: even if all the objects in the room got sucked up into space, somehow this hand might steady them and keep their feet rooted on the ground. He would taste like whiskey and cigarettes. This, at least, would feel familiar; Jake always tasted like cigarettes.

  He was so tall he had to bend down to kiss her, a little clumsy at first. Then he threw his arms around her, all limbs, and held her tight to the spot. This suited Myrra fine. She needed the feeling of someone squeezing her, engulfing her. They tripped and stumbled their way to the couch, Sem able to find his way there with his eyes closed. He’s done this before, Myrra thought. Well, of course. Tourists must be his main mode of entertainment.

  She leaned back on the couch, and Sem pressed on top of her, and it felt good to be compact and small, to have someone’s hands trail up her side and push up her dress, someone without a care in the world, someone who expected to have a good fun fuck and then go on living, wave goodbye to her in a couple of days and then eventually move away to chase a new life in a different town. She wished for time for him, time for him to screw around and fail and stay immature and stupid, she wished for time for herself, she wished for ignorance, she wished…

  She stared at the ceiling through his hair, imagining the roof ripping away. He would not be enough to keep her anchored to the floor. If the world ended right now, would this be a good last moment? Heat rose in her face. She was all pins and needles, and her breath came fast. He was kissing her neck. It felt hot and wet and good, but without her knowing why, tears were bursting from her eyes, and she cried out—

  “Stop—” she said, her voice raw. She sat up, her hai
r disheveled and her dress bunched halfway up her body. Sem jumped away from her with a worried look.

  “I’m sorry, did I—”

  “No, no, you didn’t do anything,” she choked out. The world was spinning around her, around and around. It was making her dizzy. Sem placed a hand on her knee and she jumped, unable to control her own body.

  “Would you like some water?” he said, eager to fix the situation. Sem ran to get another glass and fill it up in the bathroom. She listened to the water running out of the tap, the rising noise of the glass filling up. It felt as though the cells in her body were about to shake apart and spin out in all directions.

  She took a deep breath. It was hard to hold air in. Her heart was ricocheting off the walls of her rib cage. Sem returned with the water and sat, his face furrowed with worry.

  “I’m sorry—it’s just I heard some terrible news recently, and I don’t know how to handle it…” she said. More vague half-truths, but what else could she do? There was no way to make someone understand.

  But would it be so terrible to tell him? she thought suddenly, rebelliously. She was full to the brim with anxiety and confusion. It was going to spill out somewhere.

  Maybe this could be good for him, she reasoned. Maybe it would give him the choice of how to live the rest of his life. Maybe he’d get to see New London after all. Maybe it was more cruel to lie. And it would be good for her as well. She recalled a preacher who would come to the laundry when she was a child, handing out rosaries and cheap plastic medallions, trying to convert the workers. “Tell me your sins,” he’d said. “Confession is good for the soul.”

  Myrra took the water from Sem and drank a long gulp. His face was open, inviting her to continue.

  “Listen,” she said, “this is going to sound crazy.”

  “OK.” Sem let out a small, unsure laugh.

  “What if there were something wrong here, with the world—” she started.