Naomi and her friends are playing a game. They are in Naomi’s basement. Her mother rents the house, which is only half a house. The basement has wood paneled walls. Grey light glows through rectangular windows set just above the ground. The girls sit in the dim. It’s a Saturday afternoon in their thirteenth winter. They call themselves The Four. Leah is their pack leader, a tall brunette who plays rugby. She lives in a mini mansion with two parents, two older brothers, and a border collie named Oreo.
Naomi lives in the rented duplex with only her mother. On the other side of the house, their neighbor is a sallow man in his forties. He never has guests, but Naomi can hear his cats through the walls. Occasionally, a woman moans with what Naomi thinks is meant to sound like pleasure. But there’s never a woman in the house. Naomi believes she understands the neighbor better than anyone. She knows more about his true nature, the desperate loneliness of his days. After sharing a wall for so long with a stranger, Naomi is hyper aware of how her own life might sound to some unseen listening presence. She often stands outside herself like an eavesdropper.
In the basement, The Four deliberate over the game. Who will go first and who will be last? It goes on for a while. No one wants to be first, but no one wants to be last, either. Naomi wonders if the neighbor can hear them. She doubts it. The Four use hushed tones. Naomi imagines the neighbor with his ear and a glass cupped to his side of the wall.
The Four meet at Naomi’s to play the game because her mother is always out somewhere, leaving the girls alone. Naomi’s mother, Stella, works in a library. She scans and shelves books. The library, she says, is just a way to pay the bills. The job is not her vocation. Stella’s true calling is her work as an activist. “There’s no money it,” she often says next, like she’s some struggling artist, and laughing at her own joke. The causes change as swiftly as the weather in their prairie city where it sometimes snows in August. The ozone layer, factory farms, seal hunts, tailings ponds. Most of Stella’s causes are not popular in their city, which feeds its people on petroleum and steaks.
Naomi often wonders if in truth her mother attends her meetings and rallies, waves signs, and stands on corners with petitions in order to meet men. Meeting men, Naomi thinks, is her mother’s true vocation, a word that sounds suspiciously close to vacation—another way to meet men. Last winter, for instance, Stella had taken Naomi on a trip to Puerto Vallarta. Stella had immediately attached herself to a man named Carlos, a waiter at their all-inclusive hotel. While Carlos showed Stella what she called “the real Mexico,” Naomi spent several days and nights alone, reading horror novels by the pool and ordering virgin, and three times real, daiquiris. The beachfront was dotted with vendors selling turquoise rings, striped blankets, seafood, and straw hats. Over the tourists, a vendor called out to Naomi and asked for her name. He repeated the word, then wove the letters into a colourful braided bracelet. She held out some pesos, but the vendor shook his head. He turned Naomi’s palm and knotted the bracelet ends around her wrist. Whenever she glanced down, her name stared back at her like the hours on a watch.
Naomi imagined having her own affair with the vendor, who was tanned and handsome, if a bit too old. In her mind, he brought Naomi to the nightclub at the end of the beach. The club had a glass dance floor stretching out beyond the rocks, over the sea. All night they danced on glass, gliding and spinning over the black waves below. As the sun rose, they left the club and ran down to the beach. They swam naked, the sea washing away the sweat from the dance floor. Naomi could feel the vendor’s naked limbs slipping through the water like fish under the yellow and pink sky.
When Naomi was small, Stella would bring her along to meetings and marches. At these events there weren’t many children. Most of Stella’s activist friends were single, and Naomi received a lot of attention, as long as she didn’t act too much like a child. The activists applauded when Naomi recited slogans, especially if she did so with zeal. Together, Naomi and Stella would make signs, crouched on the floor with poster board and paint, Stella writing things like Frack Off Gassholes and People Can’t Drink Oil, while Naomi painted hearts and rainbows around the letters. A rally could be fun if it didn’t drag on too long. There was something to be said for shouting and singing and moving in a herd. One of Stella’s boyfriends would lift Naomi onto his shoulders, where she could see buildings, traffic lights, the birds and sky. Up there, above everyone, the air was almost electric, as though something really might happen, perhaps even what her mother always went on about, change, but more likely something thrillingly awful, like the police arresting a grandmother, or a crowd growing suddenly angry and volatile. Sometimes it would rain. Sometimes it would snow. But Naomi’s mother stood fervently among the crowd, answering the call of a bullhorn with purpose and vigour. Stella was never the one with the bullhorn.
But does her mother actually do any good, that’s what Naomi wants to know. “The antidote to anxiety is action,” Stella often says, her slogan-speak, and when she does, Naomi has no clue what she means. In Naomi’s opinion, action is futile. Like all children, she had lived a life of such helplessness, such little agency, and as a result she’d become something of a fatalist.
The last time Naomi attended a rally with her mother was two years ago. This one was meant to Free Tibet—twenty or so malodourous white protestors with hemp pants gathered in front of city hall. In a dark mood, embarrassed, Naomi had said to her mother, “Standing here shouting’s not going to change anything. Who here’s even been to Tibet? I bet most of these people couldn’t find Tibet on a map.” Stella had blushed and moved slightly away from Naomi, putting a sliver of distance between them, as though she wanted to act like they were not there together, as though Naomi were not her own daughter.
Naomi had been eleven at the time. She’d been petitioning her mother for a pet—she wanted a dog. Leah had just gotten the border collie, Oreo, and Naomi was desperate with envy. Oreo slept at the foot of Leah’s canopy bed. The dog made precious squeaks in its dreams. Its tiny pink tongue licked Leah’s face in the morning. But Stella said that she did not have time for a puppy. Dogs were expensive. “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” Stella said, as though Naomi thought it did.
“You say you will, but you won’t walk it,” Stella said, “and then it will be all up to me.”
Naomi was angry for a long while after that. Her mother, she decided, was a hypocrite who alleged to be doing worldly good but then had no time for abandoned dogs in animal shelters. Naomi felt that her mother might spend a fraction of the energy she gave her useless activism on Naomi and the puppy. Or Stella might get a better job, or a second job. They might move to a better house, a whole one that they owned. In the new house, there would be no shared wall, no neighbor watching pornography with his cats. With her mother’s new job, Naomi might shop at the mall instead of the Salvation Army. She imagined her unvigilant life without the neighbor. She imagined her legs in designer jeans.
Most of all, Naomi felt that her mother ought to direct a little more of her energy inward, toward her own problems, rather than trying to solve the world’s problems, which seemed unsolvable anyway. Naomi had implied all this, first in her comments about the Tibetans, and then later, when her mother sat her down to ask how she’d become so cynical. When, during this talk, Naomi further questioned her mother’s efficacy and commitments, her mother adopted a forlorn, disowning look. She scratched at the varnish on their kitchen table. A clump peeled away and balled up under her fingernail. “You have to try to do some good. You can’t just be another taker. A parasite,” she said carefully, rolling the varnish between her thumb and forefinger. “We have so much. We are so lucky. Look where we live.” Stella threw one arm theatrically wide, like a wing, like she was trying to fly away from herself. “The world’s going up in flames. You can’t even imagine the atrocities. And you want to sit around like a lump not doing anything about it.” Naomi looked around their luckless brown kitchen, compared her life to Leah’s, and wondered if her mother had any brains at all.
At thirteen, Naomi now knows not to ask for anything, since everything she wants comes from a puppy mill, or a sweatshop. Sweatshops employ girls Naomi’s age who are taken from their families in the countryside. The girls live in barracks and work fourteen-hour days in factories. They do not have the privilege of going to school, like Naomi. Sometimes the girls sneak little notes into the pockets of the many jeans they make each day. The notes are kind and curious. The girls ask, “How do you like these pants?” And, “Why are you so big?” The notes aren’t written in English so they will never be understood. When Naomi had asked how Stella knew all this, Stella cited a documentary. Stella is always watching documentaries and reporting back the horrible news. Naomi wishes her mother would just watch a sitcom like everyone else.
A few months before the Tibet incident, Stella had brought Naomi to several meetings where there were no men, only women. Naomi was asked to call her mother Stella. “I’m not just Mom you know,” Stella said. “I have a personality. I have my own wants and needs. I have a life beyond you.”
Well, you shouldn’t, is what Naomi thought.
The women weren’t activists per se but something called consciousness raisers. Outside the various houses where they met to do their raising, their bumper stickers said things like A Woman Needs A Man Like A Fish Needs A Bicycle, with a drawing of a fish on a bicycle. Naomi liked those stickers, and those women. They were less like smelly zealots and more like people who wanted to be your friend. The women asked Naomi about her life as though she were an adult. They never asked about boys or boyfriends. They used phrases like feminist awakening. The words were unrecognizable to Naomi, but she liked the way they sounded, like hisses, in the mouths of the women.
In an overgrown backyard, a group of them had stood around a pit and threw their bras into the fire. “Better late than never,” one said. They laughed and whooped. Some had hair sprouting like grass from their armpits. Two were still wearing bras. They’d brought other bras—old ratty ones—to cast into the flames. The underwear melted quickly. It smelled like burnt hair, like the women had thrown themselves into the pit.
Though it was unclear what, exactly, the women were protesting, Naomi felt overcome with excitement. All those flushed faces and that burning underwear. Her mother was somewhere in the dark, talking near a lilac bush with another woman her age, who was tall with a mannish face. Seeing her mother preoccupied, Naomi took off her fleece coat. She pulled her T-shirt over her head, then her training bra. Naked from the waist up, she leapt around the fire, weaving between the others and swinging the training bra like a lasso. Miraculously, Naomi felt no embarrassment, as though she did not yet have anything to hide. The women cheered her on raucously. This snapped her mother to attention. Stella had not thrown any bra into the pit. It was obvious from the way her breasts looked large and round, like fruits, compared to the flat flapping going on elsewhere. Naomi knew that her mother’s arm pits were not like flora.
“Naomi,” she said sharply. Everyone fell silent and stared at Stella, who had turned out to be an outsider, unwilling to part with men’s ways, crushing her daughter’s spirit with patriarchy. Naomi looked Stella in the eye then tossed her training bra on the fire. A woman with grey hair and a broad backside clapped.
Stella changed tack soon after the bra burning. She tried Tibet but grew impatient. She needed something with demonstrable results and is now attached to a group organizing in support of backyard chickens and beehives within the city limits. Bearded men in plaid shirts steward the urban chicken and beekeeping meetings. The men compost and ride bicycles. The city has strict “responsible pet ownership” bylaws, but these are not set in stone. Naomi still bristles over that word, pet. There are numerous strategy sessions held at the apartments and hovels of the bearded men. Naomi is not invited to these though she wouldn’t go if she were.
In her basement with The Four, Naomi thinks about all this as she breathes in and out as fast as she can, knees up and head down between her legs. They have played the game before, several times in fact. Initially it was Leah’s idea. Likely she learned the game’s mechanics from one of her brothers, but Naomi refuses to ask.
Though of course they had all heard of the game—they had been warned against it, the same way they are warned against everything electric. It doesn’t matter. The Four are children who eagerly defy rules set for their safety. Naomi knows that their classmates are right now watching age-appropriate films, practicing piano, drawing horses, writing poems, skating on outdoor rinks with their fathers. It doesn’t occur to Naomi that such children might be better off. The Four, she believes, are more alive than these others.
Naomi breathes faster and faster until she’s dizzy. She stands quickly, still panting, and presses her back against the basement wall. The girls have taken the cushions from the green couch and laid them on the tile to help catch the fallen. The others stand. Leah steps forward, lips parted, as Naomi takes a final gulp of air.
Leah presses down on Naomi’s neck. Leah’s hands are wonderfully cold. They smell of lavender. No one really touches Naomi since she crossed some childhood threshold and her body became illicit. She likes the pressure on her throat. She holds and holds her breath. Her face grows hot. Stars bloom before her open eyes. The stars spread and cover the room. They dart, dim, and darken. There is a wild moment of pure and pulsing happiness. Without knowing it, Naomi falls into the waiting arms of the others.
For a while: nothing. Then, she hears giggling. Her hands and feet tingle with life. The green cushions come into view. The grey light in the windows. The small television with its rabbit ears. For a moment Naomi can’t tell where or what she is. It feels the same each time. Astonishing, that she can vanish and the world carries on, her existence like it never happened. The return is equally miraculous. Life looks corrected, as though Naomi’s short absence gives her new vision. She is not, in fact, trapped. Things can just end. And Naomi doesn’t want them to, yet.
The others are giggling because a player can act in strange ways. When you faint, your eyes stay open, which is surprising. You might say things or move about like someone who is drunk, or maimed. Embarrassing yourself like this means nothing. You won’t remember. It’s as though you weren’t even there. The girls also giggle with relief. They’ve been warned that sometimes children don’t wake up from this game. Sometimes children die. This seems unlikely. The Four have been told similar stories. Someone’s brother took eight hits of acid and stayed high for the rest of his life, locked in a psychiatric hospital. A friend of a friend jumped from a fourth-floor balcony, drunk, and broke her spine. Cliffs and shallow pools, deadly sexual diseases, choking on vomit. The disasters always involve some far-removed child—a rumour or legend. Plus, The Four don’t truly believe they can die.
Naomi rests on her elbows. She investigates the flushed faces of the others. They tell her she crawled around the cushions like a baby. She mewled like a kitten, they say. Naomi laughs. She still feels woozy. Her head hurts and her eyes are bloodshot. She doesn’t hear the back door or her mother’s footsteps on the stairs.
Stella pokes her head into the room. Sitting on the floor among the cushions, Naomi meets her eye.
“Hi yous,” Stella says.
The girls wave. “Hi, Stella,” they say in unison.
Stella laughs, turns, and walks back up the stairs.
“What were you four up to,” she asks later. They are eating tofu sandwiches for dinner.
“Practicing handstands,” Naomi says.
It is not the lie that causes an anxious twist in Naomi’s belly. Something happened today. It was the first time. At least Naomi thinks so, but she can’t quite be sure. Up till now, when she’s fallen unconscious, she’s felt exhilaratingly absent, remembered nothing. But today she’d felt something—someone—there in the dark. An image, a presence. It was like she’d found a room with half-light coming in through a window. The window opened onto Naomi’s life. She could see herself through it. Falling, being caught and lowered to the floor. Crawling about and mewling, eyes open, just as they had said. She heard their nervous laughter. She heard Leah liken her to a sow. She heard and saw everything.
But she was not alone, in the dark room, before the window. Someone else was there, sitting in a wooden chair, watching Naomi’s waking life. Naomi sensed the presence first. And when she turned to look, right before she fell back into her body, she saw the figure’s face. It was Naomi. It was her own face that she saw. Though the eyes looked different, like those of a fainted girl when she was unconscious but still somehow moving or talking. They were the eyes of someone who was both dead and alive at once.
◆
They grow bored of everything, and the The Four soon tire of the game. Naomi is now the only one to suggest they play. The others would rather watch music videos, do French braids, or paint toenails. Naomi buries her excitement but in truth she isn’t tired of the game whatsoever. She has become more and more fascinated by what’s been evolving in the dark room. The room and the presence are her secret.
The other Naomi doesn’t speak. She always wears the same clothing as Naomi. Her hair is combed the same way. Her expression is blank. She sits in the same wooden chair, looking out the same window, the only source of light. Expressionless, she will turn and stare at Naomi, an unearthly passive watcher. But Naomi senses malice. It feels as though the presence enjoys Naomi’s humiliations. There is a small twitch of pleasure when the other girls laugh.
But the visits to the dark room are so brief, and Naomi loses a clear sense of what happens there. She wonders if the presence might be her own soul. This thought produces gooseflesh because Naomi has always imagined her soul as a glimmering white light emanating from her chest. The presence is a dark shadow that follows Naomi everywhere, watching and listening. At school, at home, whenever Naomi faces some new injustice, she pictures the other Naomi with that almost imperceptible smirk on her otherwise blank face. It strikes Naomi that her soul might be trapped in the dark room, and if she herself were to die, she too would become trapped, merged with her soul and looking endlessly out the window onto a view of her corpse.
It is March and still snowing. At Naomi’s insistence, The Four are in her basement playing the game. The lights are off, the cushions from the green couch placed on the tile. The television flashes music videos in the background. Naomi has decided something. When her turn comes, she will try for the first time to speak to the presence. But as she falls into the dark room, her intentions falter. She has no control over her body. She exists immaterially, like static. Pushing sounds from her throat is difficult—she does not breathe in the dark room! When she finally manages to force something from her mouth, she means only to say, “Hello.” The word sounds like the wail of a wounded animal. At this horrible moan, the other Naomi turns in her seat before the window. She stares at Naomi with empty eyes, and her face splits open. Her smile stretches wide onto a deep hole, a yawning cavity that contains the same stars and explosions that Naomi sees right before she slips from her waking life during the game. The hole contains a terrifying vastness, a void that the other Naomi appears to be guarding.
When Naomi resurfaces in the basement, she sees Leah’s face twisted in a look of horror. Leah says that Naomi’s been shaking. “Almost like a seizure?” Leah says. The others are silent and pale. “You really scared us,” Leah says. And they all pat Naomi’s limbs, which feel numb, like she’s not really there inside her body. “We’re never doing this again,” Leah says. “What a disaster.” She tightens her ponytail and turns up the music on the television. Everyone nods in agreement but Naomi. Closing her eyes, even hours and days later, she sees and sees that immaculate yawning mouth, the burning stars and endless darkness.
◆
Stella is heating jarred spaghetti sauce. She’s boiling water for the noodles without having put a lid on the pot, and steam grows over the kitchen windows so you can no longer see beyond the panes. Outside, the temperature has dropped well below freezing. Working on algebra homework, Naomi sits at the table across from Paul, Stella’s boyfriend from the urban beekeepers group. Paul’s long legs are stretched across the peeling kitchen linoleum. Propped on an elbow, he looks perplexed and bored. Above his plaid shirt and suspenders, his beard is short and brown.
At the stove, Stella is singing a Beatles song. At the table, Paul is staring at Naomi. A pale blue spot marks her neck. Naomi’s eyes are bloodshot, and Paul wonders if the girl might be stoned. As a rule, Paul himself smokes a joint each morning on the way to his construction job. He smokes another on his lunch break. He likes to get stoned before dinner, and then once more before bed. Unfortunately, Stella doesn’t smoke weed. “I get paranoid,” she’s told Paul. “I don’t like how it makes me feel. The world seems different. I can see the other side of things. I see what people want to keep hidden—all these ugly impulses.”
None of this happens to Paul. He’s told Stella that she just needs to build up her tolerance.
Paul rubs his beard and continues to stare at Naomi. He wonders what Stella would do if he were to ask the girl outside to share a joint. She’s what, thirteen, fourteen? Paul himself had first tried weed at that age. In the background, Stella snaps her fingers and shimmies. She adds noodles to the boiling water, stirs the sauce, a tart smell of tomato in the air.
Eyes on her textbook, Naomi feels Paul’s stare. Stella’s boyfriends have always paid her nominal attention and mostly she’s liked it. The boyfriends are never parents, though it’s been clear to Naomi since she was small that they all pride themselves on being good with children. Men like Paul believe they will make excellent fathers, one day. Why they believe this remains a mystery. They are often awkward, at times nearly frightened, unsure of what to say or how to act in Naomi’s presence. The boyfriends often resort to teasing, usually about boyfriends. It strikes Naomi that none of them would make particularly good fathers, seeming so much like children themselves.
But lately Naomi senses a change in Paul, and in a few of Stella’s other friends. The attention feels different—urgent and tinged with desire. At the table, Naomi can tell without looking that Paul keeps glancing at the neckline of her sweater, then at her breasts. She wonders how she ought to feel about it. Lately, Stella’s boyfriends appear more anxious than ever. They act more like Naomi’s age. They’ll ask what kind of music she likes, then say mournfully that Kurt Cobain was the century’s last true poet. Mostly, Naomi feels embarrassed for them.
A useless pursuit trying to concentrate on homework with Paul staring at her chest and her mother singing about fields of fruit. Naomi thinks of her bedroom. In her bedroom there is a belt that she ties around her bedpost, around her doorknob. She also uses a wool scarf, also a bungee cord that she’s found in the ravine behind the school. Right now she’d like to escape to the dark room, to the window. The other Naomi would know how to feel about the Pauls of the world. With her flat stare and yawning hole of a mouth, she would annihilate his ghoulish smile, his long legs blocking the way from the table to Naomi’s room. Checking over her equations, her mother’s song in her ears, Naomi pictures each of her tools—the belt, the scarf, the cord. The thought brightens her mood. She closes her math book with a snap.
Stella says, “Dinner’s ready.” At the table she places the spaghetti and sauce on trivets made with one of her meet-up groups. The trivets are woven with coloured beads. For two summers running, Stella had set up a fundraising booth and tried to sell the trivets at the city’s various cultural festivals, where she’d also distributed hand-lettered and xeroxed pamphlets meant to scare people off aerosol hairsprays, among other things. “This is what it’s like,” Stella would say to someone who’d approached her booth. “It’s like people think their minor conveniences are more important than the future of the earth and all its inhabitants.” Stella would be speaking to a woman who obviously enjoyed aerosol hairspray. “These people think it’s just fine, no big deal, that all the planet’s creatures will die. These people, they want a certain stylish look. They think their hairstyle matters more than the extinction of the black rhino or the clouded leopard.” The trivets were sold by donation. The donations would help fight the hole in the ozone layer. Would the rhino or leopard go extinct because of the depleted ozone layer? That was beyond the point. The principle was the point. Naomi would be standing near the back of the booth, watching the big-haired woman’s eyes glaze over. That’s not it, Naomi would think, stunned by her mother’s wrongheadedness. People didn’t want to consider these things. They didn’t care at all.
The trivets had not been popular. They had not raised the needed funds. Stella now had a whole stack of them in the pantry, and she gave them as gifts at every opportunity. “Everyone loves something homemade,” she always said when wrapping one of these trivets in newspaper.
Naomi twists the top of the powdered cheese shaker, its holes growing on the lid from small to large like phases of the moon. Naomi turns the top to the largest hole and pours a white hill onto her spaghetti. Paul has lost his chance to go outside for a pre-dinner joint. He’s sober and moody, appears uninterested in eating or talking. The silence feels unbearably heavy as Naomi loops noodles around her fork. In a casual tone, she begins to tell them about what the Health teacher, Ms Body—
Paul interrupts, “You ever notice that teachers have these names? It’s like ordained or something.”
Stella slides her eyes over Paul, raises a glass of water to her lips.
“Seriously. I once had a Mr Green for Science. And a Mrs Page for English. There’s a Jungian name for this phenomenon. It’s called nominative determinism.” Paul pauses. “We even had a Mr Petto for Band. It’s always a scandal with band teachers. Must be those overnight bus trips to jazz festivals and whatnot.”
Stella clears her throat. “Ms Body?”
“Today Ms Body gave us one of her scared straight lectures.” Naomi keeps her voice flat, but her pulse is racing. “About a dangerous game—she called it the choking game—where you knock yourself unconscious. You do it on purpose, for fun. Ms Body said you can die from it.”
Stella sets down her fork. Paul dabs a napkin at his small pink mouth.
“The thing I don’t get is how these types of strategies are meant to work. I mean, most of us had never even heard of this game,” Naomi glances up to see if Stella believes the lie. “But now everyone wants to try it.”
Stella has stopped eating. Her mouth is a tight line.
Naomi says, “Is it better to warn someone about something they don’t know so they won’t do it? Because if you never heard of it, you wouldn’t try it anyway.”
“Forbidden fruit,” Paul says.
“I don’t think everyone wants to try it,” says Stella. “Why would anyone want to do something that kills brain cells?”
Paul laughs. Then, Naomi laughs too.
“Have you ever done it? Have you ever played the fainting game?”
“I thought Ms Body called it the choking game,” Stella says.
“Same difference,” says Naomi.
“No,” says Stella, “I have not.”
Paul laughs again. “I’m too old to remember,” he says. “But there are other ways to alter reality. Have you heard of Zen Buddhism?”
Stella stifles a cough.
“Monks?” Naomi says.
“Yeah. But regular people, too. In Zen Buddhism, the goal is to overcome your normal consciousness, your ego. You use various techniques—breath work, meditation—as means to transcend ordinary reality. When you arrive at a place where you have no thoughts, no preferences, and most importantly no desires, then you are enlightened. The veil of your poisoned minds lifts, and you awaken to this world’s perfection. You exist as pure egoless consciousness. Practically no one achieves this state. Only a handful of monks who live on mountaintops. Like the Dalai Lama.”
Stella has left the table and is dumping her uneaten spaghetti into the garburator.
“You know what I think?” Paul says in a low voice to Naomi, who is staring at him with parted lips. “I think we can access this awakened state in other ways.” Paul holds an index finger to his thumb, pretends there is a joint between his fingers. He exhales pretend smoke and laughs.
“That thing you said, about the monks’ breathing. Is it like panting?”
“What?” says Paul. “Oh, it’s all kinds of stuff. Breath of fire. You name it.”
Stella turns on the faucet and Paul’s voice is hidden under the rush of water. “I bet Ms Body withheld from you kiddos the real reason people choke themselves.” He grabs his throat and rolls his eyes with mock pleasure while his other hand performs a lewd motion near his waist. He grins at Naomi. Then, patting his pockets, he leaves the table. The screen door bangs. A cold draft slips into the room, bringing with it the smell of falling snow.
Naomi goes to the window. Paul is shivering on the back stoop, a red ember burning near his mouth. He no longer looks self-satisfied. Alone, his face appears old and extinguished. He looks almost bitter. For a moment, Naomi feels sorry for her mother. Across the yard, the neighbor stands on his side of the dark lawn, lighting a cigarette. The two men wave at each other.
Naomi brings her plate to the sink where her mother is scrubbing the pots. Stella elbows her in the ribs. “How’s that for egoless consciousness,” she says, nodding at the back door. “Very enlightened,” she says. “He’s just like the Dalai Lama.”
Naomi laughs. Steam clings to the sink-side window. She wipes at the film with a dishtowel. In the streaked reflection, Stella is so young that she and Naomi look almost like twins.
◆
Naomi is in her bedroom with the belt around her neck. She breathes quickly and heavily. Soon she will rest her head’s weight against the leather, which is looped on the knob of her closed bedroom door. Though Stella is out for the evening, Naomi has turned the lock. Beneath her panting she can hear the layered quiet of the house—the hum of the furnace, a car on the street, wind in the leafless trees. She wants to draw out this moment, her body lit with anticipation. Bright shapes flicker behind her eyes and she can almost see the other Naomi there, in the dark room, wearing the same white jeans and striped sweater as Naomi.
They’ve learned to communicate without language. Naomi can’t explain it. Words are incomprehensible. They emerge as slow distorted moans, like a record played at far too slow a speed. She does not see letters spelled out in her mind. She does not see pictures. She just knows.
Although she yearns to, she can’t quite grasp what the other Naomi wordlessly tells her. The concepts are all teeth with no flesh to sink into. How eternity feels. Spaces that are actually no space. Particles that appear solid but can move through other apparently solid things—stones, houses, humans. Everything in the universe consists of the same matter. Stars and space rocks and flowers and insects and oceans and tigers and Naomi’s striped sweater, the belt, the scarf, the cord, her mother’s voice, the songs of The Beatles, Paul’s roaming eyes and lewd jokes, Naomi’s heartbeat, her good and bad thoughts. Nothing she thinks or does matters because everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is occurring simultaneously. This is why the other Naomi is so stoic. Everything is fated, prone to flare and dissolve at once. So her mother’s activism is useless after all. Anything that can be done is as useless or useful as anything else.
Even so, Naomi wants to see beyond the window. When she looks out there is only the doorknob, the belt, her limp head and quiet bedroom. From the window it’s easy to believe that she is both that self and not that self, there and not there. But Naomi still has desires after all. She yearns for some feeling or knowledge that will snap her free like a slingshot. The other Naomi doesn’t understand. And the visits to the dark room are so fleeting. Just as Naomi arrives she’s pulled back into her body. Then, she forgets most of what happened, like waking from a dream. She sees the living world. Breath floods her lungs. Blood fills her brain. Her nerves dance with life. If only she could feel this awake indefinitely. But soon her head aches and her eyes blur. For the rest of the night, she can’t focus. She’ll sit alone in her room, dazed.
◆
Ms Body has called Naomi’s mother. The bruises and the bloodshot eyes, the listlessness and lackluster participation—she suspects some brutish boyfriend. Or, god forbid, stepfather. Or coach, or family friend, or neighbor. Or drugs. It could always be drugs with children this age. Or alcohol. Or anorexia. Or bulimia. Or cutting. In her Health classes, Ms Body often tells them, “It gets better.” She smiles and smoothes her long flowing skirt, clutches her crystal pendant. She knows that it does not get better. The will gets old and tired, the heart fearful and weary. Ms Body will not deliver that blow. It is her job to inspire hope among legions of defeated children.
Had it been like this in her own youth? She thinks that it had not. Her childhood was largely awful but back then ugly things were kept hidden. Children obeyed authority. Neighbors were outwardly pious. The truth and extent of depravity was opaque. In her classrooms, Ms Body tells the girls, “Your body is your property!” She tells the boys, “No means no!” Surely it is better to grow up with violations and indignities out in the open and teachers like Ms Body willing to have a conversation. But then, look at this ruined child. Ms Body can’t remember any girl of her era looking so spiritless. She remembers rosy cheeks and Elvis records, sneaking a cigarette or sip of beer at the arena where the boys played hockey, being felt up on a school bus. But children like Naomi? They seemed to be willing their own destruction. Eager for it, like sharks.
Naomi and her mother are sitting on the yellow sofa in Ms Body’s classroom. It is four o’clock. The school has emptied. Normally loud with young life, the building feels eerily quiet, like a morgue. The sofa is anomalous at the school. In Ms Body’s classroom, students are not required to remain at their desks like prisoners. If a student needs a break, he or she can simply walk over to the sofa and curl up for a few minutes, a whole class if needed. “Your body is your best source of information,” Ms Body often tells them. “It sounds silly to you,” she’ll glare at the boys, “but pay attention. What’s a strong no? What’s a strong yes? Your body can tell you. Your body is your best and oldest friend.”
At one time Naomi might have gleaned what Ms Body meant. At present she feels utterly beyond material concerns. She barely eats and has grown gaunt. Dark circles shadow her eyes. Her ears ring constantly. On the yellow sofa beside her mother, Naomi wonders if perhaps she’s died. She wonders if perhaps she’s become a ghost. Now that she exists in this halfway state, floating somewhere between her life and the dark room, she sees and hears all manner of things that may or may not be of this world. Like Ms Body and her mother, like this stale classroom. Honestly, the only thing that assures Naomi she’s still alive is the moment she returns from the dark room, the moment she awakens. That’s the term the Buddhists use, awakening. And that’s what Naomi believes is happening to her. She is awakening. Only it must happen again and again.
A vase of lilies wilts on Ms Body’s desk. Hand-lettered signs blight the walls. Ms Body calls the posters IALAC signs, which stands for I Am Lovable And Capable. In class they had designed their own letters for the IALAC part. Most of the girls drew bubbled capitals with flowers and hearts and rainbows inside. The boys used black marker and straight lines. Naomi went this latter route, too. After they’d drawn the letters, and signed their names, they were told to visit each desk and write one personal compliment on everyone’s sign. Ms Body had done something similar when she was their age, and she’d kept it. The kind words had helped her through some really tough times. “You never know what someone else sees in you,” Ms Body said. “It’s a shame we can’t see ourselves through other people’s eyes.” Naomi looked around lazily. She went about writing U R nice and cool shoes on the paper signs, same as everyone else.
Ms Body sits on a wooden chair across from Naomi and her mother. Naomi runs her fingers along the fabric of the sofa. One side is soft and flattens smoothly. The other way resists and the colour underneath is darker when it’s all brushed up like that. “Naomi,” her mother is saying harshly.
Naomi. Naomi. Naomi. It sounds like an echo. Naomi can see soft shapes shifting around Ms Body and her mother. These are their doubles, just as Naomi knows the other Naomi is there too, watching through the window. But for Naomi the window has lost its pane. She feels like she’s in both spaces at once, watching and being at the same time.
Ms Body and Stella have been talking and now it seems Naomi has responded badly to some vital question. Ms Body has asked if Naomi has a boyfriend.
Absently, Naomi has answered, “Paul?”
Stella is blushing, alarmed. “Paul is actually…well, he was my boyfriend.” Implications stretch between Ms Body and Naomi’s mother like a rope.
Ms Body asks if Naomi would mind waiting out in the hallway. Naomi stands from the sofa and retrieves her backpack. Her mother and Ms Body wait noiselessly for her to leave. “Please close the door,” Ms Body calls when Naomi crosses the threshold.
She sits on the hallway floor against a bank of lockers. The muffled cadence of her mother and Ms Body’s conversation hums above the silence. It’s hot and lonely in the hallway. Naomi is tired. She tilts forward and rests her forehead against the tile, wishing she could take in air as effortlessly as plants. She focuses on her breath, in and out, in and out. Her mother and Ms Body have been talking for a very long time. The hallway has no clock, and Naomi does not wear a watch. She looks at her wrist and there is the bracelet with her brightly braided name: NAOMI. She reads it with only a glimmer of recognition, running her fingers along the knot that holds the bracelet together. The lights in the hallway go out. The janitor has turned them off because everyone has gone home except for Naomi, her mother, and Ms Body. Naomi draws shapes on her skin with her fingernail—a snowflake, a star, a heart. There is nothing to do in the hallway. Outside, life is passing by Naomi. In the late afternoon sun, Leah, who no longer talks to Naomi, tackles another girl on the rugby field. Four boys smoke cigarettes in the pines. Cars whip past. Dead grass shivers as the last snow melts from the earth.
Naomi looks at her backpack, the healthy looping straps. A girls’ bathroom waits at the end of the hallway. She stands and puts her ear to the door. Miraculously, the voices continue, murmuring on and on endlessly. Naomi considers knocking to tell them. But she’ll only be a few minutes, and even if they come looking they’ll guess where she’s gone. Her footsteps are silent as she walks, touching only black tile, a private childish game, like the orange tiles are lava, or a misstep will break her mother’s back.
In the bathroom, a faucet has been left on, a slow steady rush. Avoiding her reflection in the mirror, Naomi grips the metal dial, then changes her mind and leaves the tap running. She likes the sound, like water over rocks. There are four stalls with four toilets, four hooks on the backs of four doors. Naomi chooses the fourth stall, farthest from the entrance. She clicks the lock. She hangs the top loop of the backpack around the hook. She begins panting. In and out, in and out, as quickly as she can. She grows happily dizzy. She can almost see Naomi waiting in darkness with the same overalls, same lip gloss, same loose ponytail. She turns, kneels, and slips one of the backpack straps around her neck.