Page 36 of The Immortalists

“You’re not screwing with me, are you?” she asked.

Eddie smiled, a childlike smile whose guilelessness made her cry harder.

“Why would I do that?” he said, and leaned forward, keeping his hands in his pockets, to kiss her.

She stilled at the shock of it. She’d been kissed plenty of times, but only now did she see how intimate the act really was. She had barely spoken to anyone since Simon’s death; usually, it was too painful to even see Robert. Inside her, a flock stirred and flew toward Eddie, desperately. But when he pulled back to smile at her, a smile of delight and good fortune, her desperation turned to revulsion. What would Simon think?

“No,” she said, quietly. Eddie’s hand appeared behind her neck to draw her closer, because he had not heard her or because he had decided to pretend as much, and she allowed herself to be kissed by him for seconds more. In doing so, she could pretend to be a different kind of person: someone who kissed a man because she liked him, not because it made her forget the hard ledge of rock from which she hung, clawing.

“No,” she repeated, and when Eddie still did not let go she shoved him in the sternum. He grunted and stumbled backward. A 26 trundled down Valencia, dispelling a haze of exhaust, and Klara started after it. By the time the gas cleared, Eddie stood alone beneath a street lamp, his mouth hanging open, and Klara was gone.

• • •

That fall, during the High Holy Days, she returned to New York for the third time. Klara and Varya chopped apples for kugel, Gertie cooking the noodles, while Daniel told stories of life in Chicago. Varya, twenty-seven, had finally moved into her own apartment. She had started graduate school at NYU, where she was studying molecular biology. Her focus was gene expression: she assisted a visiting professor in removing mutated genes from fast-growing organisms—bacteria and yeast, worms and fruit flies—to see if this altered their likelihood of disease. Eventually, she hoped to do the same in humans.

At night, Klara climbed into bed with Zoya, who had, in her old age, developed a queenly indisposition to walking anywhere. With the cat on her stomach and Varya in the opposite bunk, she asked to hear stories of Varya’s work. It gave Klara hope: the match-strike of genetic expression and the infinite variables that could be used to adjust eye color, predisposition to disease, even death. She had not felt so close to her siblings in years, and everyone, even Gertie, seemed lighter. When Gertie suggested the Golds perform the kaparot before Yom Kippur, in which a live chicken is swung above the head while reciting from the Mahzor—“Children of man who sit in darkness and the shadow of death,” she intoned, “bound in misery and chains of iron”—Klara burst into laughter; the charoset in her mouth splattered Daniel’s shirt.

“That’s the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard,” she said.

“What about the poor chicken?” asked Daniel, flicking Klara’s chewed apple off with two fingers. Gertie’s indignation melted, and suddenly she was snorting, too—a miracle, it seemed to Klara, who had not heard her mother laugh in years.

Still, Klara could not explain to anyone what it meant for her to lose Simon. She’d lost both him and herself, the person she was in relation to him. She had lost time, too, whole chunks of life that only Simon had witnessed: Mastering her first coin trick at eight, pulling quarters from Simon’s ears while he giggled. Nights when they crawled down the fire escape to go dancing in the hot, packed clubs of the Village—nights when she saw him looking at men, when he let her see him looking. The way his eyes shone when she said she’d go to San Francisco, like it was the greatest gift anyone had ever given him. Even at the end, when they argued about Adrian, he was her baby brother, her favorite person on earth. Drifting away from her.

At 72 Clinton, she lay in her old bed and closed her eyes until his presence was tangible. One hundred and thirty-five years ago, the Fox sisters heard rapping noises in their Hydesville bedroom. On a gray, blustery afternoon in September 1983, Simon knocked for Klara. It was more than a creak in the floorboards, more than the whine of a door: a low, sonorous pop that seemed to come from the bowels of 72 Clinton, as if the building were cracking its knuckles.

Klara’s eyes flew open. She could feel her heartbeat in her ears. “Simon?” she ventured.

She held her breath. Nothing.

Klara shook her head. She was getting carried away.

She had all but forgotten the knock by June 21st, 1986, the fourth anniversary of Simon’s death. She’d spent previous anniversaries in bars, drinking vodka straight until she forgot what day it was, but this year, she forced herself to make coffee, tie her Doc Martens, and walk to the Castro. It was remarkable: many of the gay clubs had closed with the bathhouses, but Purp was still standing. It even looked freshly painted. She wished she could tell Simon, or Robert. Robert had never liked Purp, but Klara knew he would be glad to hear it survived.

Robert. She used to meet him downtown. In 1985, President Reagan still hadn’t acknowledged AIDS, and two men chained themselves to a building at UN Plaza in protest. Klara and Robert brought food and copies of the Bay Area Reporter to a growing mass of volunteers. If Robert wasn’t too sick, they slept outside. Klara begged a nurse who had cared for Simon to include Robert in the Suramin trial, and he received the last open spot. But the medication made him sick, so sick he couldn’t dance, and he stopped taking it within days. Klara banged on the door of the Eureka Street apartment where Robert now lived alone. “You owe it to Simon,” she shouted. “You can’t quit now.” By August, they weren’t speaking. By October, every patient in the trial was dead.

When Klara read about it in the paper, it felt like her whole body was on fire, like she could melt through the floor from the burn. She tried to call Robert, but his line had been disconnected. When she got to Academy, Fauzi told her that Robert had moved back to Los Angeles. Just picked up and left. That was seven months ago. She hadn’t been able to find him since.

She found an orange nasturtium on the ground and hooked it through Purp’s door handle. That night, she made Gertie’s meat loaf, which Simon had loved, and undressed for a bath. Underwater, her hair spread like Medusa’s. She could hear the echo of voices, muffled feet on the stairs. And then: a crack. She recognized it instantly as the noise she’d heard in New York.

She burst through the surface of the water, wetting the floor.

“If you’re real,” she said, “if it’s you, do it again.”

The noise came a second time, like a bat striking a ball.

“Jesus Christ.” When she began to shake, tears hit the water. “Simon.”

14.

June 1988: Raj stands onstage at Teatro ZinZanni as Klara paints her face in the dressing room. It’s the nicest one she’s ever been in, with a gold vanity and a TV screen that shows what’s happening onstage.

“Life isn’t just about defying death,” Raj says, his voice coming through the speakers on either side of the television. “It’s also about defying yourself, about insisting on transformation. As long as you can transform, my friends, you cannot die. What does Clark Kent have in common with the chameleon? Right when they’re on the brink of destruction, they change. Where have they gone? Nowhere we can see. The chameleon has become a branch. Clark Kent has become Superman.”

Klara sees the miniature Raj onscreen spread his arms. She lines her lips with bright red pencil.

• • •

Three months later, Klara flies to New York: her visits over the High Holidays have become a tradition. She is dizzy with happiness. Second Sight was a success, and though the collapsed birdcage poked like veins through Klara’s jacket sleeve—they’ll have the seamstress let it out—the audience didn’t seem to notice. Teatro ZinZanni has booked them for ten more shows.