Down the white hallway, the lights whisper with electricity. I imagine I can hear my mother somewhere far below, though I know I’m not there, not in Oblivion. I imagine my father’s last breath still floating in these ducts; processed, deodorized, circulating as if the building were a lung that could not help butbreathe him. The thought is so grotesque and intimate I almost smile. If he must be air, then let him be in me and perhaps together we can have our vengeance on this world.
The hallway gives way to the glass door, and beyond it the courtyard waits like a painting left too long in the sun. The sky is thin, a peeled eyelid, and the garden has been arranged with a tidy malice: low hedges trimmed into obedience, a little square of grass that looks soft and isn’t, a bench of stone that remembers the weight of those who came here to pretend they had been given a treat.
Even the birds know this is not a place to sing; they watch with their heads cocked like priests waiting for confession.
Men flank me as if I am something precious that might decide to fall. They don’t converse. Even breathing feels like a trespass. We pass through the door, and my skin drinks in the outside the way a child tastes rain for the first time. The air is a touch less ordered out here; it has not been sterilized into a sermon. It carries the faint courage of damp earth, the scandal of leaves.
I feel it on my cheekbones like hands that knew me once.
For an instant, if I turn my head exactly so I can see the long, pale reflection of us in the glass: two men bracket me the way parentheses bracket an unutterable phrase. They would like to erase me, I think, but I am a sentence they have to keep for accounting.
I walk.
That is the verb they allow me: walk.
I am not allowed to run, or leap, or even stroll. I do not get to wander. I am directed, ushered, guided with the reverence one would bring to moving a relic from one glass box to another.
The path is short, a loop around the central bed of shrubs. The hedges are not tall, but their density creates little pockets of privacy, little imagined rooms. It feels like when they designed this place, they made sure nothing could truly shelter you. The bushes are trimmed to just under the threshold of concealment.
They do not tell me when the auction is, only that it is soon. Soon is a word with a wide mouth. It can swallow a day or a month whole. It is meant to maketime indistinguishable, meant to keep me obedient, to ensure the horse does not see the danger and make a run for it.
In my mind I have already walked up the steps to the platform, already been turned slowly like a doll in a shop window, already been weighed by a congregation of eyes. It is easier to do it myself in the privacy of my skull. There, at least, the hands on me are mine. There the humiliation is contained in language and metaphor, and I can place it neatly in the corner like a monstrous plant one is determined to call topiary.
We pass the bench. A camera clings to the eaves above like a bat. It can see the top of my head and the arch of my shoulders. It cannot see inside my ribs, where my heart sits like a caged animal who has learned not to rattle the bars anymore.
The men either side of me are quiet, but their quiet has instructions in it. If one were to lean close to their silence, one would hear it speaking like a manual.
“There,” the younger one says, pointing with a chin, as if his hand would be too much like pointing at a person. “Once around. No lingering.”
“Of course,” I say.
Of course I will not linger.
Lingering is a verb that belongs to people with time that has not been mortgaged.
Lingering suggests a right to stand still.
I am to be brisk. Afterall, fresh air should not make me presumptuous.
A hedge to my right opens its jaws a little, a green space hoarding a shadow. If I angle my body, if I walk like a woman who is listening to a thought, I can slip behind it. The guards walk with a rhythm that has been practiced to boredom; their feet know the dance.
For two seconds they will not see me, not because I am clever but because they are mundane.
I am not naïve; I do not believe I will run.
Where would I go? The Brethren owns the perimeter, the town, the oxygen I breathe, the world we all live in.
But there is this little bush that does not care who I am. It barely knows its own name. It is a noise in the garden, a burr, it does not bless or judge. For thefirst time in forever, I allow myself to imagine I might need something and take it.
My spine makes a small adjustment, as if shrugging off a hand that is not there. I let my steps slow as if thinking a deep thought. I let my eyes slide away like a coin. The men do not expect trouble that does not look like trouble. I turn as if to admire the precise clipping of the boxwood, and I am in.
The bush takes me in. It hides me though in truth, it is no more than a thin green curtain and, if someone looked, they would spot me in an instant. I kneel, making myself small. The cold earth seeps through the fabric as if the dress were not there.
I do not plan to cry.
Planning would make it theatrical.
What happens is that something gives way inside the architecture of me, like plaster yielding to a leak that has been working invisibly for months. It is a soft collapse, and then a rush. Tears come from some other gravity. They are not the neat, glamorously tragic beads that do well on a cheekbone. They are the salt my body has been saving for the day it understood it belonged to itself.
