The Time of Quarantine by Katharine Haake

Author:Katharine Haake
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9845782-5-2
Publisher: What Books
Published: 2012-05-15T04:00:00+00:00

HELEN

Helen wants not to hover. More than anything, she wants her feet to go all the way to the earth, touch the dirt there like Will’s and Lyda’s, sending up little puffs of chemical laden dust and making small sounds—boom, boom, boom. Helen wants to be subject, like them, to gravity, but in her mind, there’s a split that divides each moment of running—step by step—into a separate moment of hovering, along with the knowledge that no matter how closely she attaches herself to it, there will always be another layer above, beneath—a layer, she knows, and a gap—the gap between moments, consciousness, body, earth. And this—this impossible suspension—has been going on ever since she left the courtroom with Peter in a kind of perpetual division, each moment separated from the moment before and after, each defined by the space that surrounds it, or as if she has entered her own moment of transcription where things can fold seamlessly together and fully be.

In fact, she imagines, it could be a state of grace, although it doesn’t feel like that—not yet, anyway. Something more has to happen first.

Now, as she runs, she lifts one hand to the crown of her dusty head and tries to stop, with her singular touch, the circular thinking that begins and ends exactly here and that includes, before the screen and the man who pulled her from it, the trial, the defendant, his gaze, and before even that, Remainders, the rabbit, the lettuce, the father, the heart-wrenching sounds of the dying of the world. It’s not a line but a circle, and it’s cumulative, layer after layer.

But the thinking goes on and on, and after a time, the running stops instead, as Helen’s pulled up short by the curious thought: she could come to like it.

Helen looks down at her hands: what would happen if she were to clap them, as if to call out, enough, enough of this for you. But because she also understands that nothing she can do will change the course of what is going to happen now—will restore the world to what it was before Peter lured her into his portal and then, with a barely discernible shift in her consciousness, out into this, she does nothing. Her hands do not clap. They hang at her sides. She just stands there instead, hardly even breathing, as the others catch up and she whispers, it’s just over the hill now, and then we can go.

Go where, no one thinks. They can’t think this because it has already happened that for them there remains just the span of this one, long night, by the end of which there will be stars, or not. Each, in her own way, knows this. And even if the morning finds them wandering lost and alone in the desert without water, they will still have the solace of having left. Lyda is so young it can’t mean yet to her what it means to the others—the going. But it means—and looking at her now, Helen sees this—something else, like falling.

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