Chapter 18
Two weeks left until auction
They announce the walk as if it were a sacrament.
The door silently opens. No creak, no apology, and the air from the hallway comes in with a moderated chill, a breath rehearsed and approved. My room has been white for so long the colour has entered my bones; even my shadow seems bleached.
I keep my back straight on the chair so the camera catches my vertebrae like beads, like penance.
I am always being watched and never seen.
“Walk?” I repeat, as if there were a choice, as if “no” could be anything but a confession they would love to hear.
“A little air is good for your colour,” Mrs Vale says, as if I haven’t been locked inside these past four years.
I rise as if on strings. When I stand, they do not touch me.
When they do, it is the kind of touch one offers a fragile vase that must not be marred.
A hand hovering near the elbow, a respectful distance like a moat.
They would bubble-wrap my breath if they could, keep my exhale crisp for the day I go up on the block.
Down the white hallway, the lights whisper with electricity.
I imagine I can hear my mother somewhere far below, though I know I’m not there, not in Oblivion.
I imagine my father’s last breath still floating in these ducts; processed, deodorized, circulating as if the building were a lung that could not help but breathe him.
The thought is so grotesque and intimate I almost smile.
If he must be air, then let him be in me and perhaps together we can have our vengeance on this world.
The hallway gives way to the glass door, and beyond it the courtyard waits like a painting left too long in the sun.
The sky is thin, a peeled eyelid, and the garden has been arranged with a tidy malice: low hedges trimmed into obedience, a little square of grass that looks soft and isn’t, a bench of stone that remembers the weight of those who came here to pretend they had been given a treat.
Even the birds know this is not a place to sing; they watch with their heads cocked like priests waiting for confession.
Men flank me as if I am something precious that might decide to fall.
They don’t converse. Even breathing feels like a trespass.
We pass through the door, and my skin drinks in the outside the way a child tastes rain for the first time.
The air is a touch less ordered out here; it has not been sterilized into a sermon.
It carries the faint courage of damp earth, the scandal of leaves.
I feel it on my cheekbones like hands that knew me once.
For an instant, if I turn my head exactly so I can see the long, pale reflection of us in the glass: two men bracket me the way parentheses bracket an unutterable phrase. They would like to erase me, I think, but I am a sentence they have to keep for accounting.
I walk.
That is the verb they allow me: walk.
I am not allowed to run, or leap, or even stroll. I do not get to wander. I am directed, ushered, guided with the reverence one would bring to moving a relic from one glass box to another.
The path is short, a loop around the central bed of shrubs.
The hedges are not tall, but their density creates little pockets of privacy, little imagined rooms. It feels like when they designed this place, they made sure nothing could truly shelter you.
The bushes are trimmed to just under the threshold of concealment.
They do not tell me when the auction is, only that it is soon. Soon is a word with a wide mouth. It can swallow a day or a month whole. It is meant to make time indistinguishable, meant to keep me obedient, to ensure the horse does not see the danger and make a run for it.
In my mind I have already walked up the steps to the platform, already been turned slowly like a doll in a shop window, already been weighed by a congregation of eyes.
It is easier to do it myself in the privacy of my skull.
There, at least, the hands on me are mine.
There the humiliation is contained in language and metaphor, and I can place it neatly in the corner like a monstrous plant one is determined to call topiary.
We pass the bench. A camera clings to the eaves above like a bat. It can see the top of my head and the arch of my shoulders. It cannot see inside my ribs, where my heart sits like a caged animal who has learned not to rattle the bars anymore.
The men either side of me are quiet, but their quiet has instructions in it. If one were to lean close to their silence, one would hear it speaking like a manual.
“There,” the younger one says, pointing with a chin, as if his hand would be too much like pointing at a person. “Once around. No lingering.”
“Of course,” I say.
Of course I will not linger.
Lingering is a verb that belongs to people with time that has not been mortgaged.
Lingering suggests a right to stand still.
I am to be brisk. Afterall, fresh air should not make me presumptuous.
A hedge to my right opens its jaws a little, a green space hoarding a shadow. If I angle my body, if I walk like a woman who is listening to a thought, I can slip behind it. The guards walk with a rhythm that has been practiced to boredom; their feet know the dance.
For two seconds they will not see me, not because I am clever but because they are mundane.
I am not na?ve; I do not believe I will run.
Where would I go? The Brethren owns the perimeter, the town, the oxygen I breathe, the world we all live in.
But there is this little bush that does not care who I am. It barely knows its own name. It is a noise in the garden, a burr, it does not bless or judge. For the first time in forever, I allow myself to imagine I might need something and take it.
My spine makes a small adjustment, as if shrugging off a hand that is not there.
I let my steps slow as if thinking a deep thought.
I let my eyes slide away like a coin. The men do not expect trouble that does not look like trouble.
I turn as if to admire the precise clipping of the boxwood, and I am in.
The bush takes me in. It hides me though in truth, it is no more than a thin green curtain and, if someone looked, they would spot me in an instant. I kneel, making myself small. The cold earth seeps through the fabric as if the dress were not there.
I do not plan to cry.
Planning would make it theatrical.
What happens is that something gives way inside the architecture of me, like plaster yielding to a leak that has been working invisibly for months.
It is a soft collapse, and then a rush. Tears come from some other gravity.
They are not the neat, glamorously tragic beads that do well on a cheekbone.
They are the salt my body has been saving for the day it understood it belonged to itself.
I put my face in my hands, because my hands hide my shame.
The first sob is a stranger, then the body remembers its script.
I am silent as a hunted thing, but my ribs lift and drop like misfiring wings.
I think, wildly, that in the building there is a screen where my white room is being watched by someone who is, at this moment, confused—she is not on the chair, she is not pacing—where?
And then I think, no, the cameras here see everything.
I think, I do not care, and then I think, I do, I do care so much it hurts to know that anyone can witness this break, this crack, this weakness.
I am going to be sold.
The word does not take my breath the way it used to.
I have said it silently so often that its edges have worn smooth. But here, under this trivial luxury of leaves, it flares like a brand fresh from the fire.
Sold. Owned. Used.
The words do not need elaboration. They sit on my tongue like a foul taste I can’t scrub out.
I press a fist against my mouth not to stop the sound—I have already smothered the sound—but to feel the pressure. It comforts in the way of tight spaces. We think of freedom as a vast horizon, but sometimes it really is just the width of a knuckle.
Someone coughs. The cough has that impatient politeness men wear when they are reminded of the bodies of women behaving in ways not on their agenda.
I lift my head. I have been gone perhaps twenty seconds, perhaps ten.
Time in a bush is not the same as time on a clock.
I wipe my face with my palm. My tears leave a sheen on my skin like rain on a statue before I smooth my hair back with that same hand, making order out of the chaos my face has created.
It is astonishing how quickly one can make the mask presentable.
The trick is to believe in it, pouring your dignity into it.
I step sideways out of the leaves, once more composed. I find the older guard’s gaze just long enough to remind him we have both seen me, and then I let it fall.
I do not gift him the satisfaction of a repentance. He can tell himself I was adjusting my shoelace for all I care.
“Stay on the path,” he says, almost gently. If I wanted to be generous I would hear concern in it, but I am out of generosity. I hear only protocol.
He does not look at the dampness I could not quite erase. He pretends there is nothing unusual about my sudden interest in the horticulture. Apparently, this is his gift to us; a small collusion on both our parts.
We resume. The loop around the garden is narrow. I hold myself with the ice a queen wears to walk to the scaffold, ensuring the crowd doesn’t see her as a woman whose knees are water.
I do not feel better.
I do not feel worse.
The private violence of my tears lingers in the way my body is now tuned. Terror and pride sit in opposite pews inside me, both praying. My pride prays for composure, my terror prays for release.
I belong to me.
Even when a price has been agreed and the gavel comes down, I belong to me. My tears belong to me. My brief moment in the leafy embrace of a hedge belongs to me.
The rest I will negotiate one indignity at a time.