Circuit Of Heaven (17 page)

“I’ll light a lantern,” he said. “I hope they got everything in its place, or we might spend the night looking for matches.” He disappeared into the darkness, and she heard the scrape of a drawer opening. A match flared, and Nemo was lighting a lamp. He held it up and looked around. “Exactly as I left it,” he said. “Freddie is a talented fellow.” He set the lamp down on a small shelf with a mirror behind it, and lit a second lamp beside it. They gave off a soft, yellowish light.

“What do you burn in the lamps?” she asked.

“Corn oil. There’s a commune in Maymont Park. They grow corn and beans along the old canal. They’ll take all the AM radios we can get working.”

“I didn’t think there was any more radio.”

“There’s a station out of Tennessee. They built the tower on top of an old hydroelectric dam. Late at night you can pick it up all over. Reverend Ray gives the Rapture Report every night at midnight. Lawrence says they must be cranking 100,000 watts or more.”

Justine was wandering around his room, taking it in. It was much more civilized than she’d expected. The wood floor was clean, if scarred. A doorless closet was hung with a blue curtain. All she could see beneath the curtain were a pair of green rubber boots and a pair of sandals made from old tires. There was a steamer trunk beside the closet. The perimeter of the trunk was painted with a mountain landscape. The lid was a sky blue blotted with fluffy clouds. A hawk soared in the foreground. “Did you paint that?” she asked.

“My grandmother.”

She leaned over and studied it. The paint was flaking from the top so that the clouds looked like they were spattered with tar, and the hawk’s eye was missing. “I like it,” she said.

In the corner was an old exercise bike hooked up to a generator. Wires led from the generator to a row of car batteries, and from there to a panel of switches and sockets attached to the workbench under the window. The workbench had been pieced together from several different desks and tables. The different finishes made a muted patchwork. Everything was neat and uncluttered, stuff hanging from nails on the wall or stowed in clear plastic boxes of tiny drawers. There were old posters and photographs on the walls. None of them were framed, but they were placed precisely, perfectly level. Looking down over the workbench was a black-and-white reproduction of the
Mona Lisa
. A Maxfield Parrish calender from 2015 hung beside that.

The one unaccountable oddity was an old refrigerator, scratched and dented as if it’d been dragged on its side down a gravel road. “Does that thing work?”

He laughed and opened the refrigerator door. “As a bookcase.” The shelves were packed with rows of books and papers. “Most of this stuff was my grandmother’s.” It looked as if he’d saved it all—scrapbooks, photo albums, magazines, paperbacks. In the freezer was a row of tiny books.
My Diary
, they said in gold on the spines. She wanted to reach out and touch them, to take them out and read them one by one, but she kept her hands clasped behind her back, and he closed the door. On top of the refrigerator was a shallow rectangular pan. She stood on tip-toe and looked inside. It was half-filled with water. The ceiling above it was discolored and beginning to sag. “I’ve got a leak,” he said.

In the corner was a brass bed with a white chenille bedspread. The brass was polished, the bed neatly made. A pair of sofa pillows, faded and worn, were propped up at the head. She kicked off her shoes, and sat down on the bed. Nemo sat down beside her. “The mattress was a real find,” he said. “It was still wrapped up in the plastic.”

“I like your room.” She surveyed it all again from the vantage point of the bed where Nemo began and ended his days.

Beside it was the picture of the earth, from high over North America. A red pin was stuck into Richmond. She found Dallas and thought about St. Catherine’s and Stephanie.
I left St. Catherine’s almost eighty years ago
. She reached out and touched the poster.

“What’s wrong?” Nemo asked, leaning forward.

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” She didn’t want to think about any of that right now. She was here, with Nemo, just as she’d imagined. Around the border of the poster were snapshots, mostly of Nemo and his parents. Some she’d seen at his parents’ house. She wondered if they knew he kept pictures of them. In the lower right corner was a snapshot of an old woman, a very young Nemo sitting in her lap. “Who’s this?” she asked.

“Me and my grandmother. This used to be her house. That was taken the last time we visited before she died. I was barely five. She took me up to the attic. She kept her hand on my shoulder the whole time, to steady herself. My mom was yelling at us not to go up there, telling my grandmother she was going to break her neck, but my grandmother just ignored her, saying to me, ‘I wish the hell she’d shut up.’” He laughed. “That kind of stuck in my mind. That visit’s really the only memory I have of her. She and Mom didn’t get along. I don’t know why. Mom won’t talk about it. Anyway, my grandmother showed me all her old stuff, told me that whatever I wanted was mine. The attic’s still full of most of it. I think that picture was taken after we came back down from the attic. Mom’s a great one for photographs.”

Justin leaned across the bed and looked more closely. His grandmother’s face was blurred. She’d moved when the picture was taken. She was laughing, her head thrown back. Nemo was smiling directly into the camera. Justine wondered what his grandmother had been laughing at all those years ago. Probably something the earnest little boy in her lap had said. Justine imagined the two of them sharing some inside joke, forming an alliance against his parents. She studied the little-boy Nemo and compared him to the one smiling at her side. “You were cute.”

“All little boys are cute.”

“You’re still cute.”

He looked into her eyes and touched her face with his fingertips, traced the line of her cheekbone, caressed her lips. She took his hand in hers and kissed his palm, laid it on her breast. He leaned over and started to blow out the lamps, but she put her hand on his lips. “Let them burn. I want to see you.” She unbuttoned his shirt and slipped it off his shoulders, ran her hands up and down his body. “These too,” she said, unbuttoning his pants. He stood up and slipped off his pants, kicked off his shoes. He never took his eyes off her. She pulled her dress over her head and dropped it on the floor. She wasn’t wearing anything else. She lay back on the bed, and he stood there, looking at her with lust and wonder.

“I love you,” he said.

Tears came to her eyes, and she laughed with joy, holding out her arms to him. “Show me,” she said. They made love in his bed, just as she’d imagined, the Earth above them, shining in the lamplight. They didn’t talk. For now, they just wanted to sleep in each other’s arms, to lie in the same bed. She laid her head on his chest and slept peacefully, dreamlessly.

JUSTINE
WOKE
UP
SUDDENLY
.
NOTHING
HAD
CHANGED
. IT was still dark outside, and Nemo slept soundly beside her. The lamps still burned. The clock beside the bed said a little after four. She listened to the
clink-clunk
of its ticking, stared at the Earth above them. The red pin cast a long shadow to the east.

She knew what woke her: She didn’t want morning to come. She didn’t want Nemo to wake up and remember where he was. Didn’t want him to leave her. She stared at the
Mona Lisa
across the room, presiding over his days. He was happy here before I came along, she thought. He could find his way even in the dark. Everything had its place. It was home. She knew how important that was. She’d grown up in what they called a home, calling it the one thing it wasn’t. He loved her, he’d said, but that didn’t mean he’d give up the life he’d made for himself. That didn’t mean she could ask him to. She carefully freed herself from his arms and got out of bed.

She went to the workbench and sat on the stool. There were rows of tiny screwdrivers, a small alcohol torch. She opened and closed the drawers of tiny parts. A set of headphones hung from a nail. She put them on and traced the wire to a CD player on a shelf beside the window. She pushed play and it was Aimee Mann. She shut it off, hung the headphones back on the wall.

He sat here today and thought about me, she thought.

She picked up a coil of solder and wound it around her finger, imagining Nemo in this life she was only visiting—eating, sleeping, working, taking apart and putting together all these tiny pieces. She uncoiled the solder and coiled it more tightly so that the tip of her finger turned red. The solder snapped, and she put two coils back where she’d found one. When he gets back to his real home, she thought, it will still be one coil. She could dump all these drawers onto the floor, and they’d still be where he left them. Even if we were to hide out in this replica of his world, nothing we did would change anything in his real life. Pretty soon they’d be completely different—his world and my world.

Nemo lay in the yellow glow of the lamps, his arms wrapped around his pillow. He might keep visiting her for a while. But soon he’d make up his mind. With him it would be in or out, all or nothing. She wished she’d never come into the Bin, that they were actually in his room, that he’d brought her home to stay.

She thought about Juliet, risking death to be with her love, and wondered if what John told her was true, that you could download yourself back into the real world with a new body and a new life. She crossed the room and slid under the covers, molding herself to Nemo’s body. She waited for morning to come, watching the lanterns burning, the reflected lanterns in the mirror. There seemed to be four of them. As her eyes drooped shut, she thought, only two of them are real.

Or none.

SHE
WAS
SNARED
BY
ANOTHER
DREAM
.
SHE
LAY
ON
HER
back, her legs propped up, staring at a fluorescent ceiling, white tile walls. It smelled like a hospital, and she thought, I’m going to die. Soon, I’ll be dead.

But no, this was birth.

She was in hard labor and there wasn’t any doctor and they wouldn’t fucking listen to her, screaming in their fucking faces that she needed something for the pain. She stopped screaming, panting, waiting, bracing herself as the pressure mounted, the pain spiraling in to kill her, this time for sure, each time a little deeper, like a steel band slowly cutting her in half. Why am I dying for a bad fuck? she asked herself. Why am I having this kid?

Give me something, goddamnit! Please God! Give me something you fucking assholes! I’m dying! Please! Silent, masked faces appeared and disappeared. None of them looked her in the eye, even when they stabbed at her pupils with their little flashlights, they didn’t really see her. She wanted to grab them by the throat, make them listen to her, make them look at her, but she couldn’t move her arms. She was strapped in. How could there be so damn many of them and not one a doctor?

A new face appeared, his eyes looked into hers. He didn’t flinch and vanish when she screamed at him. “I’m giving you something for the pain,” he said. “I’m Dr. Donley.” As he spoke, a delicious ooze of numbness moved across her abdomen. She laid her head back, waiting in silence, listening to the buzz of the lights. The pain came, but dull and weak, gutted of its power. It was nothing. She smiled in triumph. She wasn’t going to die. She was going to have her baby.

Dr. Donley reached down and shook her shoulders. “Justine,” he kept saying. “Wake up. You’re dreaming.” She opened her eyes and there was Nemo’s face where Dr. Donley’s had been. She threw her arms around his neck and clung to him for dear life. “Nemo, thank God it’s you.”

Nemo wrapped Justine in a blanket and made her a mug of coffee. She sat propped up in bed, her hands wrapped around the hot mug to steady them. “I’m okay,” she told him. “It was just a dream.” She didn’t even sound convincing to herself.

“When you wake up screaming, it’s a nightmare. I have them sometimes. Want to talk about it?” He sat on the side of the bed, the morning light streaming through the window behind him, his voice kind and gentle.

She tried to sound matter-of-fact, even though her voice was shaking. “There wasn’t much to it. I was having a baby, I was in serious labor. The pain was so awful, I thought I was going to die. There were people hovering all around me, but they wouldn’t give me anything because the doctor wasn’t there yet. I kept screaming at them, completely out of my head. Then the doctor finally got there and shot me up with something—and then you woke me.”

“Are you still in pain?”

She shook her head. “No, I’m fine.” Her heart was still racing. She’d been sure she was going to die. Nemo’s face was creased with worry. I must’ve scared him pretty badly, she thought, screaming at the top of my lungs. “I’m sorry,” she said.

He took the mug from her hands, set it down beside the clock, and took her in his arms. She laid her head on his chest and hugged him around the waist. “This isn’t the first dream I’ve had like this,” she confessed in a small voice.

He kissed the top of her head, delicately brushed the hair from her face. “Where you’re afraid you’re going to die?”

“No, where I’m somebody else. It’s like they’re somebody else’s dreams.”

“The same person?”

She rocked her head back and forth on his chest. “The first one was a sixteen-year-old girl. The second was an old woman.”

“How old was the woman in your dream this morning?”

“Thirty-three.”

“How do you know?”

The question brought her up short. She’d just answered automatically. “I just know. I don’t know how.” Her voice had become shrill and panicky. She clung to him more tightly.

He rocked her in his arms. “I’m asking too many questions.”

“No, it helps, really. I want to figure these dreams out.”

She told him about her other dreams, her head resting on his chest, his arms around her. She felt safe and loved. Her panic ebbed away like the pain in her dream. Telling the dreams to him, they became just stories, nothing to do with her, like one of Mr. Menso’s books. So by the time she told him the doctor in her dream was named Donley, he was just a character in a story, and the name meant nothing at all.