Catherine House Read online

  What was Baby doing right now? It was lunchtime, probably. Was she eating alone? I hoped she wasn’t alone. Maybe Yaya was sitting with her. Maybe they were serving tomato soup, Baby’s favorite, and she was feeling all right today. Maybe she was doing fine.

  I uncurled myself. I stared at the ceiling.

  I hadn’t realized that the house made so much noise. Students shuffling down the halls and slamming doors, clicking silverware and rustling paper. Pipes whooshing in the walls, whispered conversations echoing through vents. The noise had reverberated through my days like memories of a dream. Here in the tower, there was only silence.

  I pressed my hands to my temples.

  I needed to move.

  I sat up on the edge of the bed and took three breaths. I walked to one end of the room. I walked to the other. Then I did it again.

  Something clicked. I turned.

  A young, skinny, blue-haired new materials concentrator came through the door with a tray. “Oh my God, I’m so late,” he mumbled as he set the tray on the tea table. “Sorry, it rained this morning, the yard’s all muddy. Took me forever to get across.” Then he looked at me with a grin. “Actually, I guess you don’t know what time it is, do you?”

  I wondered if I should try to cover up with the bedsheet, but he didn’t seem to notice my nudity. So I just watched him.

  His tray held my dinner: a peel-top plastic cup of apple juice, a slab of grayish chicken breast, carrots from a can, and a green cup filled with wine. But the tray also held a set of plasm pins. He was fiddling with the pins now, picking one up and testing it against the flat of his hand in a way I had never seen before. It beeped.

  “All right,” he said after a few minutes of this. “Take a seat. Right there on the bed is fine.”

  “No,” I said.

  He looked up.

  “You’re not going to put those on me,” I said.

  “They don’t hurt,” he said slowly, as if I were an idiot. “They’re, well, kind of nice, actually.”

  “I don’t want this,” I said. “I don’t want—I don’t want to be experimented on. I don’t want to be brainwashed. I’m fine.”

  His eyebrows knit in confusion. “The pins don’t brainwash you,” he said, as if he were offended. “They just give you a little … realignment. A mending.”

  He stared at me, waiting.

  But I had already decided: I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t let those pins hunt through my brain. I had an idea what they might find.

  “I don’t want those,” I said. “I don’t want this.”

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again.

  “Where do you think you’re going to go?” he finally said. “What are you afraid of?”

  “You can leave the food.”

  He stared at me for a long time, his lips pursed tight. But he said nothing more.

  He slammed the door as he left.

  The chicken and vegetables tasted fine. It had been a long time since I had eaten anything so plain. I licked my fingers clean of the meat’s oil, then drank the wine while reading another chapter in the book.

  *

  Over the past months, I had been trapped in Catherine’s cycle of teas, breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, mornings and nights, classes and parties, hours, days, and weeks. But now, alone in the tower, I wasn’t trapped. I was nowhere.

  The wall next to the bed was discolored, the white paint darkened to yellow. I ran my hand over it.

  The concentrator’s words echoed through me: What was I afraid of?

  I lowered my hand and lifted my chin. I didn’t know what I was afraid of, but it certainly wasn’t him.

  I watched the door, as if willing him to come back and fight me. But the door stayed stubbornly closed.

  I flopped down in the bed.

  How many other students had lain here? Had other sweating backs curled into these sheets? Had other shitty, screwed-up kids been trapped here, hating their bodies and brains?

  Did they really get better?

  *

  I rubbed my eyes with the heels of my hands. It could be any time of day or night. I could be alive or dead.

  The minutes slid by.

  The same concentrator, the blue-haired boy, reappeared with the same tray. Sometimes it held a sandwich, other times tea, but always the pins. He never again asked to put them on me. He came, left the pins on the table, and took them with him when he went. Each time I saw them, my heart beat faster.

  What was I afraid of?

  I clutched my skull.

  I couldn’t be here anymore. I couldn’t be in me.

  But I couldn’t be anywhere else, either. I had nowhere else to go.

  *

  I don’t know what made me choose the moment I did. But then I was doing it, clearing my throat to say my first words in days, and touching the concentrator’s arm as he set down the tray. His skin was warm and human beneath my fingers.

  I said, “I’m not afraid.”

  His eyelashes fluttered as he glanced at me.

  He could tell I was lying. It didn’t matter. I was never going to be ready. But there was no other way out.

  I watched as he sorted through the plasm pins on the tea table. They beeped and clicked against each other.

  “How do they work?” I asked.

  He stared at me for a while, as if sizing me up. But he must not have seen anything interesting, because he finally just shrugged.

  “Well,” he said, lifting one of the pins, “you’ve seen these used to mend objects, right?”

  “In the Shiner videos,” I said. “I guess … I thought that footage was fake.”

  He hesitated. “Just because M. Shiner—” He bit his lip, then started again. “He did … exaggerate a bit. Obviously. He got a little too excited, and said some things that were a little, um, bombastic. But who wouldn’t? When he’d found something so incredible?”

  “So it wasn’t all a hoax?” I said. “Then what about those other labs, the ones that tried to re-create M. Shiner’s experiments? Why couldn’t they get plasm to work?”

  He smiled slightly. “Those other labs aren’t Catherine.”

  I watched the pin as he lifted it again.

  “So,” he said. “The pins haven’t changed that much since M. Shiner’s time. They’re pretty basic, really. This end here”—he made the pin chirp—“is the reader. And here on the other end is what we call the ‘exchange.’ The exchange is kind of like, well, think of it as a kind of plasm magnet. So when used together, the sensors and the exchanges can realign the plasm in your body. I’m simplifying it, but that’s the idea.” He turned the pin to admire it from another angle. “The pins are simple, but they work. Usually.” He was frowning now. “Mending objects like M. Shiner did is a strange science, you know, and a tricky one. Broken things don’t talk. But humans do. So we’ve found that in some ways, it’s actually easier to work on humans. The plasm in us isn’t any different from the plasm in everything else.”

  I shivered.

  “Anyway, don’t worry,” he said. “The pins are completely safe. Better than safe, really. The process should be like a kind of … guided meditation. You won’t feel anything that isn’t already there.”

  “What does that mean?” I said. “What will I feel?”

  He shrugged. “Only you can tell us that.”

  His hands, as he fixed the pins to my body, were quick and sure. He didn’t hesitate and didn’t talk. The only sound in the room was me clearing my throat and the beeping of the pins. I could smell him, though. He smelled like peppermint.

  After he attached the last pin, the one next to my belly button, I touched his arm again.

  “Bye,” I said.

  He turned out the light as he left.

  I touched my hair gingerly. I lay back on the pillow.

  I waited.

  *

  I opened my eyes.

  How had I thought the tower was quiet? It buzzed, loudly. The bed buzzed, the shelves buzze
d, I buzzed. I was inside them all, the bed, the shelves, the walls, the woods. I was buzzing in them like a tooth in a jaw, a part in a machine.

  I put my hands to my head. I could feel the pins sticking into my skull and belly. Was this a dream?

  No. I was awake. But where was my body? I couldn’t feel it.

  Here I was. I was sitting on the bed. I was in the tower, in the house, in the woods, by the dark trees. My hands were on the bed. I was on the bed. I was in the walls, the house.

  I was awake.

  I turned. Something had made a noise.

  The boy, the concentrator, was here. He’d come with someone else, too. They were adjusting the pins.

  I didn’t feel them. I didn’t feel anything.

  *

  I lifted my hands.

  I was perfect.

  *

  But the next time I opened my eyes, I felt sick.

  I got up and walked to the other side of the room. I pulled aside the curtain.

  I knelt on the bathroom tiles.

  I stared at my hands there, splayed in front of the toilet.

  I counted my fingers. One, two, three, four, five. One, two, three, four, five.

  I counted the tiles. One, two, three, four. One. Two.

  The numbers didn’t make any sense. There was no difference between me and them.

  I opened my mouth. I could taste it there, the poison, in the back of my throat. It tasted like every bad decision I had ever made, every stupid choice that had led our bodies, mine and hers, into that hotel room.

  But I wasn’t in that hotel room anymore. I had left those bodies behind. And now I was here—here, in the house.

  I tried to count the tiles again. One, two—

  Then I threw up. I threw up a lot. I let it all come out of me, all the poison, for a very long time. It hurt, but I didn’t stop. I didn’t stop until it was gone.

  *

  I was naked in the bed again. Viktória was standing in front of me, hugging her elbows. She wore a black linen dress.

  “I,” I said, trying to sit up.

  Viktória sat beside me on the bed.

  “You’re here,” Viktória said. “You’re safe.”

  I lay back down. I was covered in sweat, and shivering. The pins had been removed. I could see them in their tray on the tea table.

  Viktória tucked the quilt around my body.

  “It’s over,” she said. “Your past life, the things you’ve done, everything. It’s all over. You are never going to speak about it again. Not about your family, your friends, your teachers, your lovers, your enemies. You are never even going to think about them. Because none of it matters. Because it is over. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “You are new,” she said.

  She brushed a cool hand over my forehead.

  “You did beautifully,” she said. “My beautiful girl.”

  Her wrist smelled like her perfume, like flowers in heat. I pulled it closer.

  “How are you feeling?” Viktória said. “Good?”

  “Yes,” I breathed. “Yes.”

  *

  I slept in the tower a few hours longer. Then the aide unlocked the door.

  After I got dressed, I walked across the yard alone. A pearly, fragrant dawn was breaking over the trees. The house stood huge and dark and solid as an animal, intricate and deep, beneath the translucent clouds. Shadows moved in its windows. Birds flew, singing, over its turrets.

  My throat hurt.

  Baby turned from her desk as I opened the door to our room.

  “How was it?” she said.

  I kicked off my sneakers. “Okay.”

  “Five days,” she said. “That’s a long time to be gone.”

  I nodded.

  I sat on my bed, then stood up again. I gathered some papers from my desk without really seeing what they were.

  “Where are you going?” Baby said. She was tapping her pencil against her lip.

  “The library,” I said. “I need to work on my Igbo essay.”

  “Can I come with you?”

  I put my books in my bag. “Sure.”

  I waited patiently as she packed her things.

  Baby

  After I was released from the tower, I behaved myself. I took cold baths every morning, right after tea with Baby, and dressed in clean clothes. I combed my hair and brushed my teeth. I showed up to class with freshly sharpened pencils and sat at the front of the room. I took notes. I stayed awake. I went to the library and checked out books. I read them, mostly.

  But at night, as I lay in bed listening to Baby snore, I was suddenly there again. In the tower. In the dark.

  My brain seized. I clutched my stomach.

  I lunged to turn on my lamp, then blinked fast at the sudden light. I tried to breathe.

  Two moths had slipped through our open window. They quivered now around the lamp.

  I waited for my breathing to slow.

  The concentrator had told me the truth; I hadn’t been brainwashed. I still felt like myself, whatever that meant. And I could still remember the hotel and my life before Catherine. But that life seemed much further away than before, like something that had happened a long time ago in some unimportant world. Yes, I had gotten into trouble. Enough trouble that I couldn’t go home without having to answer some ugly questions. Yes, I hadn’t been able to stop what happened to that girl. I had run away.

  But where had I run to? Where was I now?

  I clutched the bed.

  I had failed one class last semester: Electricities, of course. I had passed all the others, though. I wasn’t expelled, but I was still on academic probation. If I failed a single class this semester, I was out.

  I couldn’t let that happen. I had to keep going.

  Delirious spring blurred into heady, verdant summer. The fig trees’ leaves shrouded our bedroom windows. The grass on the yard turned electric-green and grew anxious with the noise of bees and mosquitoes. Clouds of gnats brooded over the weeds.

  I spent hours that summer in the garden, behind the brick wall on the west side of the yard. The garden was a darling little fantasy of a place furnished with rows of vegetables and herbs, a stone fountain, tangling rosebushes, and a hill of bluebells. That hill was where graduations were held. The garden reminded me of the illustration from my old book. When the roses bloomed in June, their humid, ancient perfume flustered me. It made me feel like I was going insane.

  I used to think of Catherine as a dead place. In those first months, as I passed through gray libraries, parlors, and ballrooms, followed brown hallways into brown courtyards, and fell asleep, drunk and cold, in claw-foot tubs, I felt like a ghost wandering through a dream. But in the velvety summer nights, the house felt vital, like something alive. More than alive; it was mutating.

  At first it was strange to take classes in the summer, but the three-year curriculum demanded it. I was taking a class called American Photography that semester. My favorite spread in the textbook was a series of snapshots taken at parties in New York apartments during the 1980s. I spent hours one Friday studying each photo in turn. Slutty, glittery men and women, their eyes glassy with drugs and sex, laughed as they kissed each other. Lipstick smeared across their faces. They danced until they blurred.

  I was so lost in the photos that I was late to that night’s session. When I arrived, the chanting had already begun. Viktória stood by the windows in a white dress. The great hall reverberated with her voice and the echoed response.

  I slipped into a chair next to a tiny freckled girl. I folded my hands.

  I am in the house, I said. My hands are on the table. The house is in the woods.

  *

  My brain slumped, drunk. Machine noise, steel drilling against steel, reverberated through my teeth. The noise stopped, then started again. I pulled the pillow over my head. I dreamed that a mad scientist was boring into my skull.

  When I woke up, it was midmorning and I wasn’t home. I was in As
hley, in some girl’s room. I could hear her moaning in the bathroom. She’d invited me over to study for our Japanese Prints midterm. She’d brought the flash cards and I’d brought the wine.

  “Are you okay?” I called to her.

  She burped.

  I crawled over to the window, the blanket still pulled over my head.

  We were in the Ashley tower, looking over the yard. I hadn’t dreamed the noise; a Ferris wheel had been constructed on the grass. It loomed, inhuman and sinister as a spaceship, over a neon-blue high striker, cornhole game, and tug-of-war rope. A bouncy castle swayed in the breeze. On the far side of the yard, aides were setting up grills and picnic blankets. The trees’ trunks were wrapped in blue and yellow ribbons.

  The Founders’ Festival. I’d almost forgotten.

  I got dressed and slipped downstairs.

  Out on the yard, I stared up at the Ferris wheel. It was huge and silent, blinking slow in the dense, muggy atmosphere.

  “Baby,” I called. I could see her in the distance, hugging her elbows as she watched the cotton candy machine churn.

  “Hello, dear,” I said as I approached her. “Did your midterms go okay?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Did you want cotton candy?”

  The machine whirred like an engine. An aide twisted a pile of the pink stuff onto a paper cone. Baby eyed the cone without expression. “No,” she said.

  I laced my arm through hers.

  “I’m happy to see you,” I said.

  She let me hold her arm.

  A five-man brass band was arranging itself on a makeshift stage, unfolding chairs and pulling horns out of cases. As I watched them, I felt myself move closer, as if drawn by some thrilling perfume. They weren’t Catherine students. They wore suits and ties and whispered to one another as they eyed us. Sweat dampened their armpits.

  Yaya and Anna stood watching them, too, giggling.

  “Aren’t they dreamy?” Yaya said as we came near. “Guess Viktória decided we should get some real entertainment for our precious founders. Whoever they were.”

  “Do you think the band will be let inside?” I said. “In the house?”

  “Ha,” Yaya said. “I’d like to see one of them try. Viktória will have them peeing in the bushes.” She peered at Baby over the top of her peppermint-pink plastic sunglasses. “Girl, what’s wrong?”