The Immortalists(89)

‘It’s not a question of seeing something is clean,’ she said. ‘It’s a question of feeling it’s clean.’

‘And what if you don’t?’ the therapist asked. ‘Feel something’s clean?’

Varya paused. The truth was that she did not know exactly what would happen; she simply felt a constant foreboding, the sense that ruin loomed behind her like a shadow, and that the rituals could continue to forestall it.

‘Then something bad will happen,’ she said.

When did it begin? She had always been anxious, but something changed after her visit to the woman on Hester Street. Sitting in the rishika’s apartment, Varya was sure she was a fraud, but when she went home the prophecy worked inside her like a virus. She saw it do the same thing to her siblings: it was evident in Simon’s sprints, in Daniel’s tendency toward anger, in the way Klara unlatched and drifted away from them.

Perhaps they had always been like this. Or perhaps they would have developed in these ways regardless. But no: Varya would have already seen them, her siblings’ inevitable, future selves. She would have known.

She was thirteen and a half when it occurred to her that avoiding cracks in the sidewalk could prevent the woman’s prediction from coming true for Klara. At her fourteenth birthday, it felt imperative to blow out all her candles as quickly as possible, because something awful would happen to Simon if she didn’t. She missed three candles and Simon, eight years old, blew out the rest. Varya yelled at him, knowing it made her seem selfish, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that Simon’s act had ruined her attempt to protect him.

She was not diagnosed until the age of thirty. These days, every child has an acronym to explain what’s wrong with them, but when Varya was young, the compulsions seemed like nothing but her own secret burden. They became worse after Simon’s death. Still, not until graduate school did it occur to her that she might want to try therapy, and not until her therapist mentioned OCD did it occur to her that there was a name for the constant hand-washing, the toothbrushing, the avoidance of public restrooms and Laundromats and hospitals and touching doors and subway seats and other people’s hands, all the rituals that safeguarded every hour, every day, every month, every year.

Years later, a different therapist asked her exactly what she was afraid of. Varya was initially stumped, not because she didn’t know what she was afraid of but because it was harder to think of what she wasn’t.

‘So give me some examples,’ said the therapist, and that night Varya made a list.

Cancer. Climate change. Being the victim of a car crash. Being the cause of a car cash. (There was a period when the thought of killing a bicyclist while making a right turn caused Varya to follow any bicyclist for blocks, checking again and again to make sure she hadn’t.) Gunmen. Plane crashes – sudden doom! People wearing Band-Aids. AIDS – really, all types of viruses and bacteria and disease. Infecting someone else. Dirty surfaces, soiled linens, bodily secretions. Drugstores and pharmacies. Ticks and bedbugs and lice. Chemicals. The homeless. Crowds. Uncertainty and risk and open-ended endings. Responsibility and guilt. She is even afraid of her own mind. She is afraid of its power, of what it does to her.

At her next appointment, Varya read the list aloud. When she finished, the therapist leaned back in her chair.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘But what are you really afraid of?’

Varya laughed at the purity of the question. It was loss, of course. Loss of life; loss of the people she loved.

‘But you’ve already been through that,’ the therapist said. ‘You lost your father and all your siblings – more familial loss than some people ever endure by middle age. And you’re still standing. Sitting,’ she added, smiling at the couch.

Yes, Varya was still sitting, but it wasn’t that simple. She had lost parts of herself as she lost her siblings. It was like watching the power incrementally turning off throughout a neighborhood: certain parts of her went dark, then others. Certain modes of bravery – emotional bravery – and desire. The cost of loneliness is high, she knows, but the cost of loss is higher.

There was a time before she understood this. She was twenty-seven years old and taking a graduate course in the physics department. The course was taught by a visiting professor from Edinburgh who had studied with a researcher named Peter Higgs.

‘Plenty of people don’t believe Dr. Higgs,’ he told Varya. ‘But they’re wrong.’

They sat in an Italian restaurant in Midtown. The professor said that Dr. Higgs had postulated the existence of something called the Higgs boson, which imbues particles with mass. He said it could be the key to our understanding of the universe, that it was a linchpin of modern physics even though no one had ever seen it. He said it pointed to a universe ruled by symmetry but in which the most exciting developments – like human beings – are aberrations, products of the brief moments when symmetry fails.

Some of Varya’s friends were shocked by their own missed periods, but Varya knew instantly: she woke up one morning no longer herself. Three days before, she had slept with the professor on a twin bed in his campus apartment. When he nestled his face between her legs and moved his tongue, she orgasmed for the first time. Soon after, he became civil and distant, and she did not hear from him again. Now she imagined the new cells in her body and thought: You will undo me. You’ll ground me forever. You will make the world so vivid, so real, that I won’t be able to forget my pain for an instant. She was afraid of aberration, which could not be controlled; she preferred the safe consistency of symmetry. When she made an appointment to have her uterus emptied at the Bleecker Street Planned Parenthood, she saw the aberration disappear as if between two elevator doors, so cleanly it might never have been there.