The Girl woke up in bed. The bed that looked just like her bed, under the blue and pink blankets that looked just like her blankets.
It was the same, and that was the really terrible part.
She threw back the covers and sat up and stretched, feeling the coil and ache of young muscles.
It was cold in the apartment, and she drew on the familiar terrycloth robe that lay at the foot of the bed.
She rose and padded across her room in the darkness, lithe as flowing water-navigating with easy familiarity the clutter of dance magazines, souvenir programs, textbooks and, of course, the Nijinsky diary-and emerged out into the hall.
The door to the other bedroom lay half open. She commanded herself not to look again, not to give in to the tiny hope that was so akin to hopelessness. But as ever she lacked the will.
In the predawn gloom, the hissing lights from Patel’s Grocery and the Amoco billboard shed just enough illumination to cast the room in noir starkness. The Marvin the Martian clock stood sentinel by the bedside, the covers tossed aside as if another had just awoken from unquiet dreams, too, and momentarily stepped away.
But it wasn’t so, the Girl knew. There was no one else here. But there should be, a part of her memory insisted. She should not be alone. He had promised her she wouldn’t be alone.
She continued on to the bathroom, where she showered and dried and did her morning things.
She looked at herself in the mirror, just like her mirror, the silvering coming away in the upper left and lower right corners. Her hair was dark and her eyes were dark-not blue at all, though strangely somehow she felt they should be blue-and her skin was smooth and pink, and her bare feet were planted solidly on the cracked blue tile.
What could possibly be wrong about that?
Her Danskin leotard and tights hung from the hook on the back of the door and she drew them on, feeling their snug familiarity with the subtle curve and flare of her body. She picked up the Grishko slippers from where they lay curled beside the cabinet and slid them onto artfully callused feet.
She glided out into the still, silent living room and switched on the television, turned the volume low. It shouldn’t be working, she told herself in some dim back part of her mind-as she told herself every time she turned it on-but it glowed to life as always. Sometimes it showed TV series or movies she knew well, remembered from when she was little, or from more recent times. On other occasions, it displayed a puzzling multicolored snow or revealed disturbing abstract patterns.
But mostly it broadcast snatches of scenes the Girl couldn’t place-disjointed moments in vibrant color or scratchy black-and-white, some in English but many in languages that sounded like they might be Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, French. These she classified as being derived from Sakamoto or Sanrio, Monteiro or St. Ives, without clearly understanding what those names meant, or from where she summoned them.
The early daylight sun shone through the slats of the window blinds, painting the walls and the Girl with shadows like prison bars. She folded back the faded area rug, ran through her regimen of stretches. Then she assumed first position before the large practice mirror, went through her variations and barre work, felt the call and response of finely tuned muscle and sinew.
Once these motions had been primal to her, almost the totality of her past, present and future.
But now they were just something to do to fill the time, on the track of remembered action, like a train that returned you to where you started.
And beneath everything, like a low vibration just below the threshold of sound, the sense of wrongness, humming in the marrow of her bones, in the helixes within her cells.
Completing her routine in due course, the Girl ventured into the kitchen, nuked the coffee in its WNET pledge mug in the microwave. The level of instant coffee in the Sanka jar was always the same as she spooned it out, and the strawberry Pop-Tart always the last as she withdrew it from the box in the freezer and popped it in the toaster.
Is it live or is it Memorex? The Girl couldn’t quite place who had told her of the commercial with the old lady jazz singer breaking a glass with her voice-only that it had been someone with a twin, someone who had had something horribly wrong with him. But the Girl herself had never seen the commercial, and-despite the melancholy variety of programming on the set now-it never appeared.
She remembered, too, the story someone-she had trouble remembering who-had read her when she was little (but not too little to comprehend it) by that bearded guy who had written for Star Trek, in which strange creatures appeared at night and rebuilt an exact duplicate of the entire world for the next day, so you would think it was all the same.
But invariably, of course, they screwed it all up.
The Girl walked back out to the living room. She set the Pop-Tart and coffee on a side table and plopped cross-legged onto the burgundy recliner with the tear hidden in back. She reached behind her and selected a volume from the big maple bookcase that displayed the round jelly-glass stain, exactly like the one that had journeyed with them when she and the companion now walled off from her recollection had come from Hurley, Minnesota, when she was small.
The book was a tattered leather copy of Little Women. The Girl knew it well; her mother had read this book to her, and that unremembered other had, too, and she’d read it many times herself. She flipped through it. All the pages were there, and all the words.
Not so with many of the other works on the shelf, she knew. They might hold only half the words, or a third of the pages might be blank, or the cover a blur.
She drew out another book, a dark blue one with a gold dragon on the spine, and the title A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. She had not inspected this one before. With mild curiosity, she blew the dust off and opened it, saw scrawled in a childish hand on the inside front cover, “This Book Belongs to Agnes Hilliard Wu.”
The frontispiece showed a group of mustached and bearded men in animated conversation around a table, with the caption “The Doctor was evidently discoursing upon a favorite topic.” She fanned the pages. The words seemed intact, set whole. Agnes Wu must have cherished this book; must still, wherever she might be. There were other books on the shelves inscribed to Agnes, books in a lilting text that the Girl recognized (although she could not have said precisely how) as Thai; she wondered if Agnes Wu, whoever she was, might once have lived in that fantasy place.
The Regulator clock on the wall chimed the half hour-seven-thirty. The Girl returned the book to its place on the shelf, uncurled and stood.
Beyond her apartment, the city waited, and her regular classes, and the School of American Ballet.
The train on its track, circling.
The Girl emerged from her fourth-floor walk-up out onto the street, dressed in her school grays, the book bag with its toe-shoe insignia slung over her shoulder. The morning was bright and mild, with none of the weight of humidity nor razor chill she associated with so many of her days in Manhattan. Unseen, the robins and skylarks trilled their songs, and strangers bustled about on the brownstone street as if they were actually going somewhere.
Eighty-first looked exactly right; the streets she most often walked on were always as she remembered them. Some of the other streets were complete, too-maybe St. Ives or Monteiro or the others knew them. But sometimes she’d turn a corner and be back on the street she was on before, or it would just be fog.
Outside her place, the Girl passed the cherry tree within its circle of vertical iron bars, a prisoner of Eighty-first Street. It blossomed even in captivity.