The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

THENEWYORKER,M AY13, 2019 59

TNY—2019_05_13—PAGE 59—133SC. BW

so she

h,
ot until she makes an
.
a said.
y what

-

a put

y

y that

s not

nd

y and his

ce that she

k

hed behind

and

de

s

ou

mes

m

-

d lie to

y

from him, and he was the one she hated

as she walked out the door.

Now Sara put the Popsicle gently on

the plate beneath the full goblet of pills,

and went to the bathroom to shower

and change into her own bleached white

pajamas. Her mother insisted that both

bleach and white fabric kept the germs

of the outside world away.

T

he bathroom was luxurious, the

best place in the apartment, gray-

veined white marble; her father had re-

done it with tiles he’d taken from a con-

struction job a long time ago. Somewhere

in the heap of things beside the televi-

sion was a tape Sara’s parents had made

of her as a baby swimming happily in

the claw-foot tub, sleek and fat and

shining, before she could even crawl.

But this was all she knew of her fa-

ther—he was long gone—and the bath-

room had become her own place, her

mother barely visiting it.

Tonight, Sara didn’t want to leave it,

she wanted to fill the tub and soak her-

self in heat, but she forced herself to

come out into the living room again.

On the television was a family of ele-

phants in the glossy mud, flapping their

ears against the flies and spraying water

on their backs. The narrator was say-

ing portentously, “Elephants keep cool

on a blazing day.” Her mother hadn’t

shifted, but her ribs moved shallowly

with her breath.

Sara took the frozen dinners from

her backpack, slit the plastic, put them

both in the microwave, and watched

them spin for eight minutes. Then she

took them steaming in the dishtowel

to the couch.

Her mother smelled the food and

groaned, then her eyes opened and she

whispered, Baby. She moved her feet

painfully to make room for her daugh-

ter, then thought better of it and said,

Help? She no longer owned consonants,

only soft vowels. The girl put her food

on the floor, and lifted her mother. She

was a skin bag with chalk in it, far too

light to be human. Sara took her to the

bathroom, and held her over the toilet,

and gave her the paper and pulled up

her underwear and took her back to the

couch. This time, she laid her mother

down in the opposite direction so that

her mother’s head was in her lap. Sara

set her food on the armrest, so that if

she spilled it she wouldn’t burn her

mother’s papery skin. She ate without

tasting, which may have been a bless-

ing: the food was just hot brown in

brown sauce. She finished, and put her

hand on her mother’s cool head.

On the television, the elephants trans-

formed into lions and lions transformed

into great huffing buffalo. The night

went full black in the apartment’s win-

dows. As a male springbok climbed

aboard a female springbok, and the nar-

rator’s voice grew husky with excite-

ment, Sara became aware of a deeper

and stranger silence underlying the

murky underworld of the apartment,

something like darkness throbbing in

the places where the television’s light

didn’t reach. She held her breath and

heard only the air-conditioner, the nar-

rator, her own heart in her ears. And

then all at once she felt it, a slippage, a

slickness, and even though it wasn’t tak-

ing place within her own body, she could

see the slow and uncontrollable dilation

downward and outward, into a vast sun-

bright plain full of golden grasses sway-

ing as though brushed by a great hand,

and a horizon that didn’t stop in the

vagueness that came at the end of sight,

but pressed on into the palest and most

fragmented of blues.

For a long time, Sara did not move.

She held her body tightly within its still-

ness as her mother’s ear pressed heavy,

cooling, into the flesh of her leg. Sara

was frozen within time even as the tele-

vision scrolled onward through the mir-

acles of the savanna and the lifting of

white names through blackness, then

the program leaped a continent into the

icy reaches of the North, with its gla-

ciers like green inverse cathedrals and

its savage dark beasts swimming in the

waters beneath. She kept herself still

and ached, and yet forced more stillness

upon herself, because she knew that the

moment her body weakened and moved

despite her ferocious will, that move-

ment would reawaken time; and it would

all catch up to her in a bound, and the

terrible thing now happening would

have to be reckoned with, the future ris-

ing and rising ever upward, and she

would be drawn into the denser and

darker and far lonelier stuff that would

make up the rest of her life. 

What can I say, what more can I say, how much more

vulnerable can I be, to persuade you

now that I’ve persuaded myself?

Why can’t you just let it go?

Well, at least I’m in San Francisco.

San Francisco, where the homeless are most at home—

crouching over their tucker bags under your pollarded trees—

because your beauty is as free to them

as to the domiciled in their

dead-bolt domiciles, your beauty is as free to

the innocent as to the guilty.

The fog has burned off.

In a cheap and windy room on Russian Hill

a man on the run unwraps the bandages

swaddling his new face, his reconstructed face,

and looks in the mirror and sees

the face of Humphrey Bogart. Only here

could such a thing happen.

It was really always you, San Francisco,

time won’t ever darken my love for you,

San Francisco.

—Vijay Seshadri

NEWYORKER.COM

Lauren Groff on the animal ecstasy of athletics.

Fiction Groff Brawler 05_13_19.L [Print]_9452025.indd 59 5/2/19 11:18 AM