The Palace of Illusions. Kim Addonizio

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СКАЧАТЬ off. My eyes are bloodshot, the lids drooping. I forgot my hat, and my hair is flattened and tangled.

      In another couple of minutes we’re through the lobby and out of the building, on the sidewalk, empty now except for a few shadowy bodies stretched out in doorways. We walk fast toward my car, our heels echoing and amplified, like we’re on a movie set. The fog is in, and it looks like there’s no sky at all, like the movie takes place in some damp underground world where the sun never shines. I know where we are, though. I can’t see the moon, but I know it’s out there somewhere, a well of light. I tell myself I could throw myself into it any time I wanted. I tell myself that, even though I know who I am.

BREATHE

      Breathe in, the teacher—roshi, guru, leader, whatever—says, so, okay, so far, so good, deep breath, hold it, let it out on a long exhale. Amber, my roommate, smiles at me, like, Isn’t this going to be great, isn’t California so cool? and I look back like, Yes it is, even though I don’t think so. Already my knees are bothering me from sitting cross-legged. We all take a few more deep, noisy breaths. We’re supposed to close our eyes, but I peek around at the class, trying to spot someone cute who might want to talk to me later, until the teacher, woman, enlightened being, bitch, catches me, and her soft open eyes get hard, and I zip mine closed again.

      Be still, she tells us. Go inward. She has some kind of accent I can’t figure out. She sounds a little like that waitress in Montpelier, Vermont, where I spent Christmas with my parents. They didn’t want to have Christmas at home in Florida anymore; they said it would be better if we were somewhere with snow. We stayed in a farmhouse, and it was really cold. My parents went tromping around through the woods in galoshes and boots and cross-country skis, and I stayed in by the fire under a big quilt, feeling lonely and sad and fat. I felt like a big icicle was dripping inside me, without ever melting. So I don’t want to go inward. Right now I want to go home, ignore my freshman comp homework, and curl up on the couch and watch The Tudors, the entire series, for the second time on Showtime On Demand. I want broken treaties and assassination plots and girl baby after girl baby being born to King Henry VIII, while he gets more and more desperate for a boy.

      Watch your thoughts, the teacher says at this point, and I get that, that’s easy; I just imagine my TV, a thirty-two-inch flat screen I got from Best Buy. I watch Amber telling me I should do something else besides eat and watch my new TV night and day, and then I watch her fill the fridge in our dorm apartment with probiotic ginseng drinks and baked tofu, and then I rummage around on my own shelf for some sugar cookies I baked and put in there to cool. I hate them warm from the oven. I will eat the dough all day long, though. That’s bad, I guess, because raw eggs can infect you with salmonella, but if I die from eating raw cookie dough I don’t think I’ll mind; I’ll just pitch over in our kitchen with a big smile.

      So now I’m thinking about death. The death thought looks like a lump of buttery sugary dough and raisins, and then it looks like a shiny balloon that’s starting to crinkle and sag, and then it’s a baseball cap—a pink baseball cap just floating in space with no person in it. Then, as I watch, the cap falls sideways into a tunnel like it’s being sucked out of my head, and my little sister, Bethany, appears in all her dead glory, or rather in the slide show my parents made of her afterwards, that we all watched projected on our living room wall when we got back from the cemetery. It’s mostly pictures of her when she was healthy. There’s one of us in our bathing suits at Lake Placid one summer, and another where we’re posing with our Easter baskets, in bunny ears. There’s only one of her from near the end. She’s wearing lipstick and blue eye shadow and that baseball cap on her head, looking like Cancer Awareness Poster Girl, a goofy smile on her face, like she didn’t throw up the morning our dad took the photo.

      I don’t really want to watch the slideshow in my head so I open my eyes again, just let them slowly part to tiny slits so the room looks fuzzy. The teacher, woman, skank, catches me again, so I open my eyes all the way and look straight at her and give her a gentle look, like I’m all blissed out, and she nods her head at me and closes her own eyes and opens them, like, It’s all good. Which it is not, but here we are.

      I must have given her some signal because she suddenly says, Let’s all chant some Aums. Everyone tries to hold their Aum longer than everyone else and some people cheat, taking a second breath while other people are still letting out the first one. I get my Aums over with as fast as possible. All I want is to get out of here and go home and order a big gooey sausage-pepper-onion pizza from Red Boy and eat the whole thing in front of the TV. Anne Boleyn and Cardinal Wolsey are down with the sweating disease. They’re going to recover from that, but they’re done for, anyway. Wolsey will get arrested for treason and kill himself, and Anne will stand on the scaffolding bravely addressing the crowd, saying nice things about Henry, who ordered her head cut off. She’s going to forgive the black-hooded guy with the sword, and kneel down and pray. She’ll look up at the sky. Black birds will flap around for an instant in the blue. I really want to see that episode again.

      But the class, torture session, boredom hour, has just begun.

      With your eyes closed, says our guide, simply watch your breath. She says this looking straight at me, so I have no choice.

      But how are you supposed to watch your breath? My breath doesn’t look like anything. First I imagine my tongue is a road, and my breath is wind whooshing down from some black space in the back of my head, but I can’t really see the wind. All I see is a long road disappearing into the horizon. I make my teeth the mountains and put some tall trees on either side of the road, and I add a river behind the trees on one side, flowing in the same direction as the wind. I see the leaves shaking, and some of them coming free to land on the road, and then a car comes by and runs over the leaves. I see a dragon kite with a long green tail. I see the river flowing into an ocean, and waves scrunching up into white foam, then one big wave carrying all the dead kings and queens of England and Wales and Scotland and France and Spain, smashing them on the shore, and there’s a sand castle on the shore that also gets wiped out. The towers turn to wet stumps and the moat fills with salt water. Soon there’s nothing, and then some man’s big shoe print appears. Thinking about the ocean makes me have to pee, and I wonder if I’m allowed. Amber is sitting on the cushion next to me. I wonder if I can get away with whispering to her and asking if we can go. Probably not.

      The room is warming up from all these bodies breathing.

      Inside my head I see the space heater glowing in the bedroom Bethany and I used to share. I remember a night I was lying awake in the dark, listening to the little fan in the heater. This was right before she got sick, before we knew how bad it was all going to be. I watched car lights crawling through the window, along the carpet between our beds and up the wall, sliding across our dressers. Bethany was asleep in a pocket of shadow. Her feet stuck out of the covers on the side of the bed. Her feet were all I could really see of her, when a car came by and the beams went over them like clear water, and I was kind of hypnotized by how they looked, small and perfect, like an angel’s feet might look, or a fairy princess’s—she’d been running around all day in a green tutu and a pair of pink and purple wings. I imagined her falling off some glittery cloud to land in our bedroom, her long hair fanned out around her face. Then she sighed and shifted, rolled over, maybe, and I couldn’t see even her feet anymore. I knew she was there, though, right beyond the arc of the car lights. That’s what I see now. Our old room and everything that belonged there, Bethany and me and our dressers and the lights of other people going back to their houses at night. I watch my breath fill the room, and I hold my sister inside it as long as I possibly can.

THE OTHER WOMAN

      It would end in disaster, everyone said, and everyone was right, СКАЧАТЬ