Blackout; she must have drunk herself into a blackout. Her sister told her every one of them cost her about four IQ points. Anna’d promised there wouldn’t be any more. This time she must have wiped out an entire circuit. Knives, drills, awls—anything mean and sharp she could think of—were grinding through bone and stirring gray matter into froth. Each tiny brain cell nailed to its own tiny cross was keening to die.
Molly was going to kill her.
Except Molly couldn’t; Anna wasn’t in New York City anymore.
Where the fuck was she?
Arizona, she remembered, or maybe Utah.
At the Port Authority she’d gotten on a Trailways bus with a suitcase and three paperback novels. She’d ridden this bus till all the blood in her body had vibrated down into her fanny and feet. A soldier lounging in the seats across the aisle—or a guy in khaki with a webbed belt—had pulled out his dick somewhere in one of those flat rectangular states and waved it at her. She remembered that.
“What am I supposed to do?” she’d asked. “Faint? Scream? What?”
He’d put it back in then. She remembered how sheepish he’d looked.
“Leave it out if it makes you feel better,” she’d told him. He’d gotten off the bus a while later, but she’d been asleep when he did.
She’d stayed on the bus until it reached a point a few miles south of the middle of nowhere: Page, Arizona; Lake Powell; Glen Canyon National Recreation Area.
Passed out drunk in Dumb Fuck, Arizona. Or Utah.
“Shit,” she muttered. Grit coated her lips and tongue. Sand. She’d passed out facedown in the sand. Through the misery coagulating in her cerebrum she could vaguely see herself camping on a beach, one littered with toilet paper blooms and human feces she had to scoop out as if people were cats and she was the keeper of their litter box. Surely that was nightmare, not memory.
With an effort she raised one eyelid. The other eyelid remained shut, nailed in place by the daggers in her skull or the surface her face was mashed against. Through the slit between her eyelids she could see her left hand, the wedding band Zach had given her glinting dull gold, sparking with a glare so intense it threatened to slam her retina three inches into her brain.
The movie that played every morning when she awoke began unreeling.
The paper bag D’Agostino’s had packed her groceries in was limp, wet with drizzle that had been falling since noon, drizzle so stagnant with the heat of July it lost the ability to form real drops. Her hair was damp, braid trailing down her back, heavy as a hangman’s rope. The Levi’s that had fit when she’d put them on that morning stretched and drooped in the steam till they threatened to fall from her hip bones. Her pants legs trailed on the sidewalk. She was waiting to cross Ninth Avenue at Forty-first; one long block to Tenth and she was almost home.
“Pigeon!” came a shout. Across the avenue, Zach waved both arms over his head, making his six-foot-two scarecrow physique look even taller and narrower. The drizzle and the heat plastered his dark baby-fine hair to his neck and cheeks; his glasses were askew and his clothes loose and ill-fitting. Anna thought he was the most beautiful man in Manhattan. Seven years of marriage had done nothing to dull the thrill she felt when she saw him.
Fire on the soles of her feet banished the dream movie. She must have passed out with her feet in the sun. Sand, sun: outside. Was she a tourist attraction on a dung-infested beach? Turning from the glint of her wedding band, she tried to push herself up on her elbows. Sharp and grinding pain knifed through her left shoulder. The arm did not move. Her head threatened to explode, dimming the vision in her right eye. She fell to her side. The arm was broken or dislocated or badly sprained. Her head was broken or dislocated or badly hungover. Nausea, sudden and violent, spewed the contents of her stomach out. Dizziness, so bad she dug her fingers into the dirt to keep from being pitched off the surface of the earth, spun her.
Finally, vomiting stopped. Dizziness abated. Anna stared at the mess splattered over her bare breasts, the end of her braid trailing in the muck.
“I’m naked,” she whispered.
In front of her was a short stretch of sand, then a wall. Afraid to move, she rolled her eyes: wall and sand and sand and wall. She was nowhere. A beach in a box. She was naked in the bottom of a rock-lined hole and couldn’t remember how she got there. Poison flowed through her veins, making her eyes blurry and her thoughts sluggish, but she couldn’t remember getting drunk. She couldn’t remember anything. Either this wasn’t a hangover or it was the last hangover, the drunk that put her down like a sick animal. Or pushed her back over the edge into crazy. Crazy, she remembered. Crazy was an empty purgatory ten thousand masses couldn’t free her from.
Panic slammed into her viscera, vision tunneled, skin prickled.
Squeezing her eyes shut she murmured, “Shh, shh, shh, you’re okay. Naked in a box is better than dead in a box.” The butchered line from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead brought her back to Zach. He was playing Rosencrantz in an Off-Broadway production she stage-managed. Now she and Guildenstern awaited him in purgatory. Tears of fear seeped from the corners of her eyes. A sane person would know why she was naked and broken, getting stranger and stranger in a strange land.
“No,” she whispered. “You’re not crazy anymore. This is real. Shh, shh, shh.”
Easing to a sitting position, she cradled her left arm across her stomach. Her shoulder was deformed. A rounded lump pushed out in a knob the size of her fist, skin pulled so tight it was shiny. Images of Sigourney Weaver, an alien bursting from her sternum, shot through her mind, making the dislocated shoulder surreal, terrifying.
Closing her eyes against this impossible existence, Anna began the catechism her sister teased her with. Molly was a psychiatrist; she knew crazy when it scratched at her door.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Molly asked.
That was an easy one. No fingers; Anna was alone with her own ten.
“What is today’s date?” Molly demanded.
“July 1995,” Anna whispered. “I don’t know what day.”
“Who is the president of the United States?”
“William Jefferson Clinton,” Anna murmured, proud of herself for remembering the Jefferson part. Molly would give her points for that.
“You’ll do,” Molly said with a wry smile and faded from Anna’s internal landscape.
“Don’t go,” Anna cried, but it was too late, her sister was gone.
Slowing her breathing and relaxing her muscles one by one the way Molly had taught her, Anna felt the panic back off. It wasn’t gone, but it was bearable. “This is not purgatory,” she assured herself. “They don’t let Protestants in.”
Encouraged, she opened her eyes again. No longer blind with fear and pain, she saw smooth stone curving up from the cushion of sand where she sat. Streaks of rose and buff and gold whirled upward nearly thirty feet as if sandstone had been twisted, pulled like taffy. The shape was as perfect as an earthenware bottle thrown by a master potter, the upper part flowing gracefully into a narrow throat that curved into a slanting tunnel. At the end of the tunnel an eye of blue was punched out of the sky. A single lozenge of sunshine, scarcely more than a yard across and a foot wide, reached the sand; the source of the sun on her bare feet. Spinning in the petrified tornado, her thoughts were as wild as wind-blown debris.
A solution hole; she was in a solution hole.
That thought was carved out of the chaos between her ears with difficulty. Around Lake Powell were hundreds of solution holes. She’d seen them from the boat. Jenny, her boss, said they were deposits in the sandstone made of softer stuff, and over the millennia they eroded away, leaving smooth, irregular holes. Jenny boasted Glen Canyon Recreation Area was home to one of the largest of these formations in the world.