Hex - Rebecca Dinerstein Knight Page 0,56
about the questions I now sat begging.
I don’t know, I’ve never done it before. It felt fine.
I want her the way I want anything I want. Wanted. She’s as gone as Tom.
Because of her grace that ignites rivers.
Because of her power that births herds of deer.
“Okay,” Mishti said. “You know that if she had left Barry and went off with you she’d be your whole life and you’d be her midlife crisis.”
This one hurt and I had nothing to say about it. Mishti looked at me without any fur between her eyes, as if she were completely complete. As if loving Tom were making her ill and entire. As if everything we want that isn’t love is a substitute for love, and once the original is there the substitutes feel hopelessly redundant. It was incredible to watch somebody who’d always craved success now suddenly and only crave romance.
“Which is fuller,” I whispered to Mishti, “the longing or the union?”
“How could I know?” she said. “I’ve never felt a union.”
“What if being with Tom was more boring than loving him?”
“What if you didn’t actually like going down on Joan?”
“What if you found kissing Tom as boring as I did?”
“What if Joan found kissing you as boring as Tom did?”
“What if you’re wrong about what you think you want?”
“What if you’re wrong about who you think you want?”
Anjali came out of the kitchen.
“How quickly can you bind a toxin to its own antidote,” I said without preface, because I didn’t want to miss my chance. “I have two giant castor beans planted in my apartment. Could I, chemically speaking, detoxify the ricin in the beans quickly enough to make the detoxification a legitimate remedy?”
“You’d need to leave time for a reaction,” Anjali said unambiguously, her daughter’s mother.
“Not just a pairing.”
“A molecule can’t attack itself, it would need to interact and then neutralize.”
“Detoxification as an action rather than a state.”
Mishti couldn’t tolerate this change in subject, she gripped my hand and said, “Would you love me if I were wrecked?” and then walked very weakly toward the bathroom.
“Do whatever you need to do in there,” Anjali told her. To me, she said, “Activated charcoal can bind the ricin once it’s been digested.”
“So you wouldn’t die?” Mishti asked, opening the bathroom door.
“No, my baby,” said Anjali.
I liked having a mother right there to know better. I liked the way Anjali stood in her own rectangle of window light absolutely unclouded and vivacious, holding an alphonso mango and answering us.
When Mishti closed the door behind her, Anjali sat on the couch as if she’d been standing for twenty-six years and said, “Love can be fought for but not insisted upon.”
Joan you bask of crocodiles you cloud of flies you skulk of foxes you smack of jellyfish you tiding of magpies you stud of mares you watch of nightingales you muster of peacocks you nye of pheasants you drift of quail you unkindness of ravens you knot of toads.
Mishti came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, sobbing. She said you can cry over spilled milk when you are the spilled milk. I held her until she ran out of snot, tears, and breath. Anjali and I put her to bed. As I stood in the doorway, boots tied, coat zipped, Anjali rotated her two palms on either side of my ears and then brought them back to herself. It meant something benevolent in her language and I left with my temples buzzing. On the street I could no longer hear Mishti’s phlegmy coughing and the absence of it felt disastrous. A handful of rational citizens waited for the G train. Eventually it came, the doors opened, and I was not wrong to want you, Joan, my exaltation of larks.
RACHEL
Could I have seen the disaster, small as it must have been? Could I have seen the mistake itself? Could I have seen the little annihilation death performed so invisibly, so lightly, we mistook it for air? We called it Thursday afternoon? We gave it no name and went home?
What would I have said?
Don’t?
Please? Could I have begged her back from whatever she’d already done? Could I have healed her, heard her, borne her any witness, shoved her beside herself, thrown her the rope of my arm, knocked her off her only path, helped her down from the irreversible? Kissed cure into her mouth? How quickly did it turn too late? How high did the room temperature need to rise to trigger the conditioning that made her