Fever Dream: A Novel(5)

“His new being?”

“To me it was so important to know where he would go, Amanda. But she said no, it was better not to know. She said the important thing was to free David from the sick body, and to understand that, even without David in that body, I would still be responsible for it, for the body, no matter what happened. I had to accept that compromise.”

“But David . . .”

“And while I was turning it all over in my mind, David came up to me again and hugged me. His eyes were swollen, his eyelids were red and taut, inflated like the horse’s. He wasn’t exactly crying—the tears were falling but he didn’t shout or blink. He was weak and terrified. I kissed his forehead and I realized he was burning with a high fever. Burning up, Amanda. At that moment my David must have already been seeing heaven.”

Your mother grabs the steering wheel and sits looking at the gate at the end of my driveway. She is losing you all over again: the happy part of her story is over. When I met her some days before, I’d thought she was renting a summerhouse like I was, while her husband was working nearby.

What made you think she was from out of town, too?

Maybe because I saw her as so sophisticated, with her colored blouses and her big bun, so nice, so different and foreign from everything around her. Now I feel uneasy because she starts crying again, and because she won’t let go of the wheel in my husband’s car, and because Nina is wandering around the house alone. I should have told Nina that when she got the lollipops she should come back to the car, but no, better for her to stay away, there’s no reason for Nina to hear this story.

“Carla,” I said.

“I told her yes. I told her to do it. I said we should do whatever we had to do. The woman wanted us to go into another room. I picked up David, who practically passed out on my shoulder. He was so hot and so swollen he felt strange to the touch. The woman opened the door to a room, the last one at the end of the hall. She gestured to me to wait in the doorway, and she went in. The room was dark, and from outside I could barely make out what she was doing. She put a large, low washbasin in the center of the room. I understood what it was when I heard the sound of the water, which she poured into a bucket first. She went out to the kitchen, looking focused as she passed us, and halfway there she turned and looked at David for a moment. She looked at his body as if she wanted to memorize his shape or maybe his measurements. She came back with a big spool of thin hemp rope and a handheld fan, and she went back into the room. David was boiling so much by then that when she took him from me my neck and chest were soaked with sweat. It was a quick movement, her hands darted out from the room’s darkness and then disappeared again with David. It was the last time I held him in my arms. The woman came out again, without David; she led me to the kitchen and poured me more tea. She said I’d have to wait right there. If I moved around the house, she said, I could shift other things by accident. In a migration, she said, only the things that are prepared to move should be in motion. And I clutched the teacup and leaned my head against the wall. She went back down the hall without another word. At no point did David call for me, nor did I hear him talk or cry. A few minutes later, I heard the door to the bedroom close. On a kitchen shelf across from me, the seven sons, now grown men, stared out at me the whole time from a large picture frame. Naked from the waist up, red beneath the sun, they were smiling and leaning on their rakes, and behind them was the big soy field, recently cut. And just like that, motionless, I waited for a long time. Maybe two hours, I’d say, without drinking the tea or ever taking my head from the wall.”

“Did you hear anything, in all that time?”

“Nothing. Just the door opening once it was all over. I straightened up, pushed the tea aside, my whole body alert, but I couldn’t bring myself to get up. I didn’t know if I was still capable. I heard her footsteps, which by then I could recognize, but nothing else. The steps stopped halfway to the kitchen, before she came into view. And then she called to him. ‘Come on, David,’ she said. ‘I’m going to take you to your mother.’ I held on to the edge of my seat. I didn’t want to see him, Amanda, all I wanted was to escape. I wanted it desperately. I wondered if I could reach the front door before they got to the kitchen. But I couldn’t move. Then I heard his footsteps, very soft on the wood. Short and uncertain, so different from how my David walked. They stopped after every four or five steps; hers would stop as well while she waited for him. They were almost to the kitchen. His little hand, dirty now with dry mud or dust, fumbled over the wall as he leaned against it. Our eyes met, but I looked away immediately. She pushed him toward me and he took a few more steps, almost stumbling, and now he was leaning on the table. I think I’d stopped breathing for that entire time.When I started again, when he took another step toward me, this time of his own volition, I leaned away. He was very flushed, and sweating. His feet were wet; the damp prints he’d left behind him were already starting to dry.”

“And you didn’t pick him up, Carla? You didn’t hug him?”

“I sat there looking at his dirty hands. He was using them to hold on to the table like a railing as he walked, and then I saw his wrists. He had marks on his skin, lines like bracelets around his wrists, and a little above them, too, maybe left by the rope. ‘It seems cruel,’ said the woman as she approached, watching my reaction and David’s next step, ‘but we have to make sure that only the spirit leaves.’ She caressed his wrists, and as if forgiving herself she said, ‘The body has to stay.’ She yawned, I realized she had been yawning since she returned to the kitchen. She said it was the effect of the transmigration, and that it would happen to him, too, as soon as he finished waking up. It was important to get it all out, to yawn with the mouth wide open, to ‘let it go.’”