Deya Bhattacharya

Reformation

Deya Bhattacharya

They are being checked each for emotional stability as they enter, the scanner beeping red or green as it sweeps them head to toe. Most of them are green by default but three still turn up red and are ushered off. Marie finds a window seat and turns to look at the two women and one man who are now gazing at the rear end of the bus, vacantly, like pieces left over at an auction. She brings her face closer to the window and breathes, watching the mist grow thick and then recede from the periphery inward, and she is just in time to raise her finger and paint a line through it before the glass dulls over and turns matte black.

The reformatory is tall, white and evenly windowed. The little she can see of the surroundings as she exits the bus is flat, topped with a sky whose blue is unrelieved by either cloud or sunshine. Dinner has been sent to the rooms - a baked potato and a chicken salad, no dressing, just like she’d requested. There is a single bed, a cupboard, a grey shag carpet and a bathroom attached. Among the documents she has submitted beforehand is a self-attested statement that she has disposed of all the relics of all her loves except for one memento, something portable, like a letter or a piece of clothing. As she takes off her contact lenses she thinks of how she chose not to bring Francis’ grey T-shirt, one of many he would douse in Old Spice before heading out to work or anywhere else. After he moved out she had hung the T-shirt up unwashed in her closet and allowed herself a single embrace of it every day, rationing it out so the smell would stick longer, until one day all she could smell was moth.

Day One. They are filed into a room with chairs arranged in a half-circle and asked to sit. When it is Marie’s turn to share she holds up the scrapbook tied with green ribbon and talks about the boy with whom she had filled it all the way up to the halfway page, which was when he had stopped taking her calls but she had still held on to the phantom of him and filled the rest of the pages with experiences she wished they had had - movie tickets, concert passes, motel receipts, a condom. A bucket has been brought in and they come up one by one and place their mementos inside. They do it for the most part without hesitation, all except for a girl with bluish-black hair and pierced eyebrows who lets out a howl right in front of the bucket and holds the object to her chest and says she can’t do it, she loved him too much, she’d rather go on hurting than let go of it. One of the nurses steps forward and encloses the girl in her arms. From where Marie is watching it could well be strangulation, the enormous white back of the nurse and the twig-like girl invisible except for her face, which is tense at first but then relaxes muscle by muscle, as though she is winding down, and she doesn’t respond even when a second nurse takes the object from her and drops it in. As the lighter clicks Marie can make out a face on the object, a soft kind like a kitten, and feels a sharp and sudden pang. Motor oil makes a big blaze and the smell is rapidly unbearable. Marie shifts her gaze to the floor and does her best not to cough.

Night. Dinners have been served and washed up after and the nurses have retreated to their wing. She waits an extra twenty minutes to exit her room and make her way down to the kitchen door. Under a

fold of her shawl she holds the memento, whole and unburnt, that she has retrieved from the secret compartment inside her bag. She goes into the garden and makes her way towards the flowerbeds at the south end where a rake has been left obligingly next to a patch of freshly tilled soil. About a foot deep, she estimates, and the job done and herself back in bed in under half an hour. Perfectly simple - except that there is someone else already bending over the soil.

“You’re not the only one, you know,” he says a few minutes later. They are side by side on a bench with their mementos on their laps.

“It’s hard to destroy something that once meant so much. It’s like setting fire to that version of yourself.”

“So the others brought fakes to the exercise too?”

“Some of them, yes. They’ll hide the real ones here, like us, or maybe they still have the real ones back home locked up somewhere. Just so they know it exists.”

In the moonlight he appears young, almost youthful, but she can tell from the timbre of his voice that he is over sixty. He picks up the scroll of paper on his lap and opens it out. It is a likeness of him in pen and ink, an excellent one.

“My second husband made this for me on our last trip together. It was in Rome, at the Trevi Fountain. I was in the way of a bunch of kids making wishes and one of their coins caught me right at the back of my neck.” He chuckles. “Said he’d never seen anyone as annoyed about being pelted with money as me.”

“Was he a professional artist?”

“He went to art school, yes. Couldn’t ever quite make it big, though. He lacked the - how shall I call it - the panache. The thing you need to get people to listen to what you’re saying.”

“Hustle, is what they call it these days.”

“Hustle, yes.” He smiles. “No, he was never a hustler, my Tomas. Hustling was my wife’s thing - my first wife.”

“Your wife?”

“I’ve been married to both, you know,” he confides. “Marriage wasn’t about the sex, not for me. It was about companionship, home and hearth, going through things together. It’s even happened that I was married and we never laid hands on each other. That was my first wife too, actually,” he adds. “Used to be a nun, but she left the church after one of the priests tried to get a little too close to her. She came out determined to never let God or a man near her again but she was lonely and she needed warmth and a home, and I was happy to give her both. And she made the most excellent spinach cannelloni.” His eyes take on a faraway glaze, whether at the thought of the first wife or the cannelloni it is hard to tell.

“How many times have you been married, if I may ask?”

“Five.”

“And they didn’t...work out?”

“People change, you know,” he says. “Or they die. No other reason to end a marriage, really.”

“And which was it with the former nun?”

“Oh, she changed. Three years into the marriage. Started volunteering at a charity for fallen women and said she couldn’t in good conscience have a home of her own when so many others were kicked out of

theirs. We put things in order and she moved with the charity to Bolivia. Still there, I believe.”

“That must have been hard to deal with.”

“It was,” he says serenely, “but then the others were too. Different people matter differently - can’t say any one of them was a harder loss than the others.”

“And why does this memento matter?”

He opens his mouth readily enough and then pauses. She doesn’t immediately see it but then she does, the dulling over of his eyes that now stare vacantly ahead, almost as though a veil has dropped between her and them. He rolls up the paper and stands.

“We should finish up soon, it’s getting cold.”

Day Two is about self-affirmation. They are given sheets of paper and asked to write good things about themselves that have nothing to do with how they look. “You need to be in touch with the core ‘you’,” the nurse is saying. “What lies at the heart of you - what makes you tick, what do you have that no one else has?” Here again, the girl with the pierced eyebrows is seen to protest. What she wants to write about, it transpires, is her hair - which, being a physical attribute, she is not allowed to write about.

“But it’s my hair,” she insists. “I fought for it. People kept asking me to change it - cut it, wave it, colour it brown, colour it green - and I just kept doing it and it messed up my hair and I still kept doing it but this hair, the way it looks now, this is me. It is me.”

The nurse listens all the way through and shakes her head, nothing aggressive, just a gentle side to side and then back to centre. It is the same nurse who took the memento from the girl on the first day, or perhaps another - there is a uniformity to their faces and movements that makes Marie suspect they might be androids, and well they might be with what it costs to come here. She looks down at her own page. Who is the core ‘she’, and does one exist at all? How did one scratch out the imprints that life and people had made and be left with anything other than blankness? As a three-year-old she had liked sticking bottle caps onto construction paper to make shapes in geometries that Francis would later tell her were fractal. After a pause she writes ‘craft’. The girl with the pierced eyebrows is the first to leave. She is leaning against the wall outside when Marie comes out, her makeup pooled into her under-eyes.

“It’s all right, you know,” says Marie. “To want to write about your hair.”

The girl shoots her a quick look and says nothing.

“It’s important to you, and that’s what counts,” she continues. “I guess they have certain guidelines here about the kinds of exercises that will work best…”

“They’re just like everyone else,” snarls the girl. “They want you to do all that self-love shit and call yourself things you know aren’t true. ‘I am powerful’ ‘I am enough’ ‘I am a warrior’ ‘I am a goddess’...” She exaggerates the quote marks, rolling her eyes backward in near-comic sarcasm. “Like,” she reverts to her snarl, “do they really think we’d need all this reformation shit if we were goddesses?”

Rhetorical questions have always posed a challenge for Marie, like a thrown gauntlet of sorts. Did one walk away? Nod sympathetically? Shrug it off? For a change, however, she has a real answer.

“You know, my ex-husband used to think the same way.”

She waits for the warning signs, an acceleration in heartbeat or a sudden coldness. Nothing. Almost but not quite surprised, she goes on.

“He had no time for things like positive thinking or affirmations, any of this. Talk, he used to say, idle talk when there was work to be done. Most practical man you’d ever meet. Give him a poem, he’d ask you why none of the commas were in the right place. He was an automotive engineer - great at his job. But then again,” she reflects, “he never did quite get the hang of talking to customers.”

“So what happened with him?” asks the girl abruptly. It’s too personal for a first conversation, and yet Marie has invited it by bringing him up.

“Oh, well,” she says, distilling the truth to the barest of essentials, “he cheated on me.”

The girl looks at her wearily, or is that the makeup?

“Doesn’t everybody, at some point?”

Day Three. The neural scan, to help the reformation target the imprints of the pain they want to forget. There are markers for it that show up on the scanner—Marie can see the screen for the person currently inside, an outlined brain with patches of blue all over like spilt Gatorade. When it is her turn she is given a hospital gown and told to relax. More from ease of association than anything else she thinks about Atticus—her other best friend, one could say, the silent witness to her growing-up years. Arshi and Atticus, Atticus and Arshi. Afterwards her head aches and she goes to the cafeteria. The man from the garden last night is at a table by himself. He looks up as though on cue as she enters and smiles.

“Saw you talking to that punk girl earlier,” he says as she sits opposite him.

“Don’t you mean goth?”

“Quite likely I do. How does one tell the difference, anyway?”

“I was a little surprised to see her here, honestly,” she says. “She looks too young to have been through anything that calls for reformation.”

“One could argue that it’s pretty harsh to have a qualification process for heartbreak in the first place. It’s like the people who didn’t make it are being told their troubles aren’t valid enough.”

“You’d rather it be more democratic?”

“As long as one can pay for it, why not?”

“Why not, indeed? Less trouble for us. No psych evals, no polygraphs, no scanners that might send us off the bus at the last minute.”

“Even the tests aren’t a hundred percent accurate, if you think about it. They make sure you’re emotionally stable at the time you’re testing, yes. But who’s to say the people who passed didn’t go on a drinking binge two nights ago and clean up in time to catch the bus?”

“Is that what you did?” she laughs.

“Of course not.” He laughs along with her. “I stuck to my Vicodin.”

It is a joke, most likely, and yet it makes her uncomfortable. She looks away from him and upwards and notices for the first time that the perimeter of the ceiling is not straight but bevelled, curving upward into a dome of white that makes her feel like something caught in an egg.

“By the way,” she says to change the subject. “My name’s Marie.”

He smiles.

“And a very pretty name it is.”

She waits for ten seconds and then excuses herself.

Day Four is about healing through handwork. Each of them had to mention on the form something they liked doing and hadn’t done in a while, or something they’d wanted to do but never could—“within reason” had been added prudently. Implements are ready at individual workstations and they have three hours to do what they will. She draws a fistful of bottle caps from the boxful they have given her and pushes them around on the construction paper, avoiding anything fractal-like. What she ends up with each time looks like worms, and finally she picks the two largest and starts to flick them against each other like carrom coins. A shadow falls across her desk—the man from the garden.

“Restrictions here too,” he says without preamble. “Just like everywhere else. I don’t think there’s any place or time where you can truly do what you like.”

“So what would you like to do that isn’t within reason?”

“Go skiing in the Alps,” he says at once. “And fall at least seventeen times.”

“Quite the contrast from woodwork.”

He looks at the saw in his hand and smiles. “My grandfather was a carpenter. I grew up playing in his workshop - learned how to make a chair from start to finish by the time I was ten. Later for the Red Cross I made toys. Little bitty things, animals, ships, cars, houses. Kids in war zones, they need things they can keep hidden - anything bigger, their parents will sell it for food. And say all you want, a full belly isn’t quite the same thing as a full heart, especially for kids. I like woodwork,” he adds, almost as an afterthought.

“That was kind of you.”

“Oh,” he says off-handedly, “I only joined after my first husband. Ken was, well, what they call a taker. Lived off me the entire two years we were married and then left me. That was when I figured, if I couldn’t give him enough to get him to stay, I might as well switch the giving to folks who’d need it.”

“And then came Tomas.”

“And then came Tomas.”

“May I say I’m sorry you had to go through what you did?”

“Oh, believe me,” he says lightly. “It’ll hurt him much more. Because when you’re the one who hurt someone else you have to deal with knowing how they’re feeling and that you did it to them. Someday, somehow, he’ll see what he did, and it’ll eat him alive.”

And who is he talking about - Ken or Tomas? Before she can respond he is speaking again.

“She wasn’t with us on the bus, you know.”

He is looking over her right shoulder. She turns around and sees the girl with the pierced eyebrow at the workstation nearest to the door, doing something with a pair of scissors.

“How else would she have come here?” she says.

“You know she’d never have made it past the scanner.”

His eyes are glossy, unreadable. There is a twitch in his jaw which she remembers seeing before, a tic of sorts, appearing in sets of three or four to the southwest of his mouth. A thought strikes her - is Vicodin all he takes? On an impulse she gets up and moves towards the girl’s workstation. She braces for something childish, destructive, but is surprised to see her cutting intricate shapes out of origami paper.

“That’s lovely!” she says automatically.

“So I’ve been told,” says the girl without looking up. She finishes a star-shaped design and pushes it

onto the table already covered with pieces. Marie picks it up and sees that it is in fact the head of a dragon, the jaws open, the fangs pointy. There are no eyes.

Two PM, after lunch. They are lined up in rows and given microphones. The lights have been dimmed. Sonorous music is playing.

“Tell yourselves - I will heal,” says the nurse in front, her voice pitched low.

In almost perfect sync they join in. “I will heal.”

“Say loud and clear - I will survive.”

“I will survive.”

And it could be her wedding day all over again - the candles, the murmuring, the mushy view through the veil. The minister had had a stutter and taken twice the usual time to get them wedded. Someone had called to her to get away while she could. She had smiled—how could she not? and blushed just the right shade of pink—Francis had been picking at something on his lapel.

“I will rise again.”

“I will rise again.”

“I will be whole again.”

“I will be whole again.”

“I will be free again.”

“I will be free again.”

And hearing her own voice in unison with everyone else’s she can almost feel it, a sort of deeper power being unlocked, telling her that maybe she could really rise again, be whole, be free...

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.”

She opens her eyes. It is the girl with the pierced eyebrows, standing with her hands clapped over her ears and her eyes squeezed shut.

“Don’t make me do it, I can’t do it, I can’t forget, I can’t…”

Some of them are looking confused, while others continue the chant determinedly. Marie doesn’t know whether a patient can be pulled out this late, but it has to happen, the girl is obviously not ready. And yet no one is ushering her out, or even looking as though they are about to. When a nurse finally does approach the girl it is with a glass of water and what appears to be a pill. She takes both without protest, her thin chest exhaling, and when she walks out immediately after the nurse in front resumes the chorus without change of expression: “I will rise again.”

“I will rise again.”

When they file out Marie goes to the cafeteria, then to the scan room, then to the craft room, and then outside to where the flowerbeds are. The girl is sitting on her haunches and poking holes in the earth with her forefinger. She takes her time about looking up at Marie, and when she does, it is to rap out a question.

“What was your memento?”

Marie blinks.

“A scrapbook. You saw it.”

“I’m not stupid, you know.” The girl has purple lipstick all over her chin. “What was the real one?”

For a moment Marie is about to tell the girl to go to blazes. And then she smiles.

“A toy horse I made with my best friend when we were both ten years old.”

The girl nods.

“And yours?” Marie feels entitled to ask.

“Oh, mine was real all right,” says the girl bitterly. “A cushion. A fifth birthday present from my dad.” She pauses. “Right before he told me to come sleep with him in his bed so he could keep me safe.”

“To keep you - oh god.”

“It happens all the time, I’m told,” says the girl. “He said we had to build a new world together and that I was the key to that world. He’d bring people to the house - men. He’d call them guardians, say they needed me to unlock their own new worlds. I did it. How could I not? They loved me. He loved me. And by the end of it I loved him too. They tried to get me out of it at the psych ward—told me it was abuse. A trauma response. Bullshit. I loved him. Call me fucked up if you want, but I loved him. I loved him and I’m not going to stop loving him. That’s when they sent me here. Said it was the only way I could get a chance at a different life.”

It is nearly five. The girl is staring straight ahead, her finger retrieved and slumped with the rest of the hand over her knee. Marie would have expected cuts along her arms, but they are stainless, hair-free, like the arms of a statue or fantasy figure.

“When you—when this is over,” Marie begins, “you’ll be able to see it for what it was. What your father did. Reformation - that’s what’s wonderful about it. It puts things in perspective for what they really are, beneath the feelings…”

“But I can’t see it any other way,” says the girl, and now there are tears. “I love him. It doesn’t matter what he did to me - I love him. I can’t help it. I can’t forget him - I don’t want to forget him.”

“You won’t forget him, not exactly, but…”

“What do you mean I won’t forget him, what else are we here for?”

And Marie knows she cannot help her, except to pull the shawl off her body and drape it around the thin shoulders, as she imagines a mother might. As she casts a glance back before reentering the building she sees that the girl has wound the loose end of the shawl around her hand and is teasing the hem, absently, with a nail.

Dinner is silent except for the scrape of cutlery. They eat in focused mouthfuls, their eyes on their own plates and their jaws working deliberately, as though by concentrating hard enough they can distance themselves from what has happened. The announcement has sanitised it for them—deeply regret that one of our number is indisposed, procedure to happen tomorrow as scheduled, etc etc—but the nurses have not been whispering loud enough and Marie is sitting right in front, and so she knows, knows what they caught the girl in the act of doing with the shawl, knows that it took six of them and three shots of sedative to hold her down. The man from the garden is sitting next to her. She avoids looking at him throughout the meal, and pretends not to notice when he follows her outside. For the first time she has been asking herself why she has been confiding in him, a man who won’t even tell her his name, and she is angry at herself and him and everyone else whom she could have spoken to and didn’t. But he is handing her a

peppermint and looking expectantly up at the moon, and so she tells him, as coolly as she can, about her encounter with the girl.

“Poor child,” he whispers as she finishes.

“Here’s what I don’t get, though,” says Marie. “Why reformation? Reformation’s meant for heartbreak. Lovers. The kinds of memories she has, how can one ever not feel pain? It doesn’t feel right.”

“As to that,” he says, “it would depend on how you define reformation.”

“Well, a drug’s a drug, isn’t it?”

Several seconds pass before he answers.

“The thing is, I don’t suppose any of us stopped to ask what reformation was really all about. Can’t say I blame us—I suppose it was too good a deal to question. A single procedure, goodbye heartbreak. But how does it work, exactly?”

“Well, that’s for the doctors to know and us to benefit from.”

“If I were to ask you now,” he continues, “as a layman, to tell me about reformation, what would you say?”

“It...” how had the brochure put it? “It takes away the pain from past hurts. Gives us a clean slate to start over.”

“And how does it do that?”

“By removing the memory of the pain. The neural scan picks up on the imprints of it, targets it…”

“Can it?”

“Can it what?”

“Can it really target the pain?”

“That’s what the scan is for, isn’t it?”

“The scan picks up on the pain you’ve already felt. What about the pain you haven’t felt yet?”

She opens her mouth and then closes it again. At some point the moon has gone behind a cloud— bathed in the near-darkness he is speaking gently, almost dreamily, and it is as though the world around them has slowed down to match, like a record played on half-speed. Even the wind seems to be listening.

“Kind of genius, you know?” he is saying. “The way the mind can torture us. Get over one thing, you’ve got ten more waiting in line; set up one block, you’ve got a hundred others to contend with. It isn’t just about the actual heartbreak, you know—it’s all the attached memories. You can forget the memory of what your loved one said, but what about what someone at the next table was saying right at the same time? What if you think about that and then it hurts all over again? And then there are the things you don’t remember now, but which you could—suddenly, out of nowhere. Little things, maybe. Things your loved one did, and the things he said he would do but never did, and the things you forgot you did. And then there are the people. People you didn’t know were there at the time but they were, and you could run into them years later and they’ll say something, anything, and suddenly you’ll remember, and it’ll hurt all over again. A million parts of your brain, waiting to fire, and we don’t have a clue when or if.”

“But then why the scan at all?”

“You told me yourself,” he says quietly. “What that girl said. She came here to forget.”

“She came here to…” And then, like ice, it slides home.

“It can’t be,” she says. “All the exercises we’ve been doing…the affirmations…”

“Paving the way,” he says quietly. “Getting us ready to let go.”

“But you don’t know for certain.” She struggles to keep her voice level. “You can’t know for certain.”

“I don’t.” And now he meets her eyes. “The question is, do you want to find out?”

Some years ago, after a minor operation, Marie woke up in the middle of the night and found herself in a void. The world clicked back on only seconds later, but during that spell of blankness the thing that Marie had been most conscious of was the silence - not a voice, not a machine, not a strain of music anywhere. It was the silence that made her debate the chance that she had slid briefly into a parallel world, for in this one, surely, even in a power outage, people would talk? When she had asked Francis about it he had laughed and said that the drugs must have messed with her hearing. But she looks now at the man hunched over on the park seat, at the skin drawn across cheekbones that must once have been beautiful, and she sees on his face that same void - a complete, almost beautiful blankness severing him from the rest of the world. She thinks of the drawing he had shown her, buried now near the rosebeds, and then she thinks about Atticus buried next to it, soil or even insects leaking in through the torn seams, and how she and Arshi had stitched him together out of scraps of felt and pearl buttons. How long was it that she had cried over Atticus the day she’d found out, up in the attic, the knees of her jeans gathering dust that never quite came off after? Something brushes her cheek—it is a hawk, gliding onto a treetop and perching there, a near-invisible cutout against the sky. And she knows then that the man cannot stay in that void any longer, any more than she could have stayed on in that hospital or in that attic. Their place is here, in the world of the hawk - she has to bring him back out.

“About Tomas,” she begins. The man’s face spasms almost imperceptibly.

“You said earlier—that it hurts far more when you know you’ve hurt someone and have to carry the guilt of it. But the ones who got hurt—they’ll never know if that happened. What if we have to live all our lives wondering whether the people who hurt us know what they did—or was it maybe our fault instead?”

Instead of responding, he examines his fingernails.

“These little white specks,” he says, extending his hand palm-down. “They’re supposed to indicate a vitamin deficiency, but most people, they just wait for the nails to grow out so they can cut the white bits out. Did you know,” he says suddenly, “that every cell in the human body regenerates itself in seven years?”

“Sounds like something that would circulate on the Internet.”

“Well, that’s where I first heard of it,” he admits, “and then I did my research and found out that it was true. And, well, it became something to live by. I’d keep comforting myself with it every time I was hurt. Told myself that every seven years I would literally have a new body, that the people I had loved back then would have loved a biologically different me. And yet the mind persisted. No cell regeneration there. I remembered things from twenty years ago, thirty years ago, and if I tried hard enough I could remember how it hurt too. And I was tired of it. People talk a lot about learning from experiences, but it felt like I’d taken about as much wisdom from my pain as I could, you know? But I - I see it now. It isn’t about learning, it’s about living. The cells you can’t shed, you adjust to. Reformation, it’s a cheat code. And I’ve been cheated too often to do it to myself.”

“Which is why,” he gets up and looks around at the garden, “it’s time for me to leave.”

He has moved closer, and now for the first time there is warmth in the eyes that lock with hers, as do his hands. And when the kiss follows it is natural, unhurried, the affection of two people who know that they do not have time and thus have all the time in the world.

“You could come with me, you know,” he says to her as they walk.

“It wouldn’t work.”

“We’re paying to be here. They can’t keep us against our will.”

“But where would we go?” she reminds him. “And more importantly, how? This is the middle of nowhere.”

“Which means that every step away from here is a step closer to somewhere.”

“Or deeper into nowhere. Maybe the middle of nowhere is really the closest we are to somewhere.”

There are twelve hours to go until the procedure.

“So what will you do when you go back?” she asks.

“Grow flowers, I think. There’s much to be said for a garden of one’s own.”

“Flowers have a language, you know. Floriography. That’s how men courted women in the old days.”

“Perhaps I’ll send you letters in floriography.”

“Perhaps you will.”

They kiss again.

“And just in case you remember any of this,” he says as he turns to leave, “you may call me Cain.”

“Is that really your name?”

“It might as well be.”

She wants to say something else, but he is already walking away, his shoulders squared back. In another world there would have been alarm lights, commands to stop, but there is nothing now except the unlatching of the gate and then the click of the latch back into place, smooth and creak-free, and then he is gone.

Day Five. The nurses are wearing blue scrubs. Blue for birth, blue for regeneration. The head nurse is even wearing lipstick.

“Everything you have experienced with regard to heartbreak will be gone,” she is saying as a doctor doles out syringes full of something orange and viscous. “You will be whole again. You will be free from all the hurt. And if you want to, you will be able to love again as though for the first time.”

Fall had just begun, she remembers, that day when she and Arshi had their last picnic. They were taking turns throwing stones to try and fell the apple from the tree, and for twenty minutes had done little but shake it. And then Arshi had grabbed Atticus from the picnic blanket and hurled him nose-first at the apple and they had fallen, apple and Atticus together, the one on the soft belly of the other. Arshi had split the apple down the middle and held one half out to Marie, and Marie had accepted it and they had eaten their shares in four identical bites, but when Arshi’s back was turned she had picked up Atticus and slipped him into her jacket. She should perhaps have talked to Arshi about it rather than doing what she did - ignoring calls, refusing playdates, sitting at different tables in school - but perhaps even then she had sensed who Arshi really was and had wanted to avoid her, however crudely. It wasn’t long before

Arshi started responding in kind, and when the boy they had both liked since kindergarten had chosen Marie as his date to junior prom it had been easier than ever for them to stay apart. And now Marie can lean back, both literally and figuratively, and think about whether things could have gone differently if she had told Francis the truth about Arshi and what she was capable of. As things were, he’d had no warning— she had just been a woman he’d met at a bar. It had been Arshi who had known, who had planned each step with the care of a secret service agent, tracking him down and studying his movements and deducing his preferences and then putting herself in his way and working on him slowly, inexorably, until he had no option but to give in. When Marie had found out she had known at once that it had been this way —divorcing him had been a matter of form. She had called him only once after, when she heard about their accident—speeding Honda, straight to the liver—and how he had escaped with a broken arm and a chipped tooth. He had answered the call, and for ten minutes had talked evenly and unbrokenly about the baseball score and the weather and the kayaking he would like to do that summer. It wasn’t worth it, she had wanted to say then to Arshi, Francis wasn’t worth it and neither was the boy at prom, men rarely were. And she wonders if the man who called himself Cain will send her flowers after all.

Five more to go before Marie’s turn. Up in front the ones who went first are waking up, stretching their arms as nurses hurry forward with glasses of water. Three more to go. The girl with the pierced eyebrows gets her dose and slumps back, mouth hanging open to reveal tiny teeth. There will be more pain after this, Marie wants to say to her, there will always be people who hurt you, whether they love you or not, and maybe it’s the people who loved you the least that will break your heart the hardest, and sometimes they’ll die and you won’t have to try and forgive them but sometimes they’ll live on and that’s okay too. The floor beneath is an ash-blonde, newly swept, momentarily free of dust.

“Right arm out,” the doctor says.