Heartland by Ana Simo

Author:Ana Simo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction;Ana Simo;Ana Maria Simo;Heartland;Heartland novel;Heartland book;Cuban authors;Cuban-American authors;Cuban novels;lesbian fiction;lesbian novels;dyke fiction;lesbian noir;alternate future;9/11 novel;immigrant novel;Mercy McCabe;New Racialism;Lesbian Avengers;queer fiction;Eileen Myles;Michelle Tea;sci-fi dystopia;Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing;Junot Diaz;murder mystery;lesbian activist;Medusa's Revenge;Dyke TV;The Opium War;debut novel;telenovela novels;pulp noir novels;dystopian satire;dystopian fiction;best dystopian fiction;murder mystery;books about race;best lesbian fiction;best lesbian books;margaret atwood;handmaid’s tale;Junot Diaz;book club books;cuban authors
Publisher: Restless Books
Published: 2017-12-29T20:30:05+00:00

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Gone

People always leave something behind when they go, a letter, dirty tissue, loose change, a gum wrapper. But not McCabe. It was as if she had never been in the house. As the sun began to set on Thanksgiving Day, I sat on the floor in front of the open refrigerator eating slices of supermarket ham and white cheddar with my fingers. I’ll eat here like a pig until McCabe shows up, I thought. “That’ll sure bring her back,” Reason remarked, blowing cigarette smoke in my face. “You don’t know why or where McCabe has gone,” she said, ignoring my protestations that McCabe must be back in New York City tending to her gallery. “Furthermore,” she added, lighting a fresh cigarette off the butt of the old one, “you don’t even know why you care.” That was preposterous. One thing I was absolutely certain about: I cared that McCabe had vanished because I was about to kill her. I needed her here for that purpose. This rational certainty was the cornerstone of our domestic happiness since my accident. Reason didn’t hear my indignant answer. She had returned to my frontal lobe, where she dwelled, having implanted her poisonous pods.

The more rational a certainty, the harder it is to kill the vulture of irrational doubt circling overhead. The tools of reason fail: the hungry vulture just circles lower, excited by the stench of the logical brain. McCabe’s sudden absence, the clean blank page she left, the way she erased herself from the house, amplified the doubt, which was now being played inside my head by a full, bombastic symphonic orchestra, all 230 instruments in thickly imbricated harmony. It was, and it wasn’t, the “Finale” of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, in whose tragic reverse recapitulation Goebbels had found the equanimity to admit that two thousand years of Western history were in danger.

I returned to my room on my hands and knees, oozing blood and pus. By the time I was soaking in the tub, my orchestra had stopped playing, and I, too, contemplated doubt with equanimity, even with pleasure. With the familiar (McCabe) gone, leaving a horrific chasm worming with serpents at the end of the map, doubt—musically implanted, repeated doubt—had become familiar. Why and where McCabe had gone, why she hadn’t told me, and why I cared now, seemed legitimate subjects of inquiry. Physical pleasure and its concomitant indolence fueled this benign view: the warm water luxuriously covered my body up to my throat. This was my first bath in a month. I left my feet out, propped on the tub ledge, wrapped in clean towels. Tomorrow I might get them wet and see what happened.

I examined McCabe’s disappearance dispassionately. An emergency could explain the suddenness of her departure. Could it explain her silence, too? I imagined McCabe getting a dead-of-night phone call from her boy assistant: her gallery, along with Manhattan’s southern tip, set on fire by Caliphate terrorists, or flooded, or blown off (all of which had happened more than once before, although her gallery was unscathed each time).

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