Infinite(51)

The name of the book was Portal.

The author was Karly Chance.

I went into the bookstore and picked up a copy. The first thing I did was check the last page to see whether the publisher had included a photograph, but the only information was a brief biography. Karly Chance is a lecturer and poet-in-residence at Northwestern University. This is her first collection.

That was all.

I checked the listing of poems included in the book. The one-word titles unsettled me. One was called “Cut.” Another, “Plaything.” Another, “Jump.” Another, “Candy.” When I flipped through the pages, I was impressed but also horrified. Her poems used beautiful imagery to build a tableau of violent self-destruction, like Thomas Eakins painting the blood of a nineteenth-century surgical procedure in exquisite detail.

It seemed impossible to me that the Karly I knew could have written these poems. I’d never seen a side like that in her personality. But then again, this was not the Karly I knew.

I also thought about the word her faculty colleague had used in describing her background.

Trauma.

“You should read the book,” a voice next to me said.

I looked around and saw a young woman no more than twenty, in a Northwestern T-shirt, with her brunette hair tied in a ponytail. Her name tag told me she was a bookstore employee. As I held the book in my hand, she tapped a purple-painted fingernail on the cover.

“The poems are really deep. I mean, some of them will turn your stomach, but if you want to know what depression can do to someone’s head, it’s all in here.”

My finger caressed Karly’s name on the cover. “Do you know her?”

“Sure. I’ve taken her class.”

“What’s she like?”

“She’s amazing. So many of the profs around here are just talking heads, you know? But Karly lived it.”

I smiled. “You’ve sold me.”

I followed the young woman to the cash register. As she rang up the sale and took my money, I said, “You mentioned depression. Is that what the poems are about?”

“Oh, yeah. She spent years in the cave.”

“Did something happen to her?”

“You don’t know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Well, Karly was in a car accident right after college. She talks about it in class and doesn’t sugarcoat how bad it was. She had her mom in the car with her, and they were having some kind of big argument. The two of them didn’t get along, like really didn’t get along. Karly got distracted. She ran a red light, and they got T-boned. Her mom was killed.”

I felt those words like a blow to my chest.

“She spiraled after that,” the girl went on. “She spent a year in hell. Heavy into meth, abusive relationships, suicide attempts. The last time she almost succeeded.”

I hesitated, but I needed to know. “What did she do?”

“She drove her car right into the river.”

I had trouble standing. Waves of violent memories rolled over me. My mother, dead on the floor. My father, with the gun in his mouth. Roscoe, dead in the seat next to me, his face shredded by broken glass. Dylan Moran on the riverbank, the rats eating his face.

Karly and I, swirling and tumbling in the black water.

Roscoe said: Fate has a way of making even the smallest details converge.

“Shit,” I murmured.

“Yeah. When they pulled her out, she was dead. No heartbeat. No oxygen for like four minutes. They put her in a coma to give her brain a chance to recover, but nobody figured she’d come out of it. But she did. She says that was what finally turned her around.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

“Anyway, enjoy the book,” the girl told me with a macabre smile.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

I left the store, still devastated by what I’d heard. I took the stairs up to the next level, and I used a coffee coupon on my receipt to buy myself an iced latte. When a table opened up, I sat down and began reading Karly’s book.

Knowing it was her, knowing what she’d been through in this life, made the words almost unbearable to me. All this naked emotion roared off the page. Fury. Lust. Savagery. Ecstasy. Coldness. Guilt. Despair. “Plaything” was about bondage with a series of strangers. “Candy” was about her overdose of pills. “Jump” was about standing on an eighteenth-story Marina City balcony, naked and high as a kite, hallucinating that her mother was shouting from the ground below that she should climb over the railing.

Jump, she said to me.

Jump, she sang.

I told myself that this was a different Karly, not my Karly, not the woman I knew, but I realized something as I read the book that made me impossibly sad.

This was my Karly.

I could hear her voice in the turn of a phrase. Little things she’d said when we were together, the words she’d made up about people, showed up here. The poems sounded exactly like her. All the pain, all the darkness, had been inside her when she and I were together. Same soul, same mind. Maybe it had taken a journey of shame to bring it to the page, but she’d had this identical wounded heart all along. I had never seen it, never asked her about it, never dived into the deep, deep pool of who she really was.

I had loved this woman and not known her at all.

How could I have missed it?