The moment passed. Marko awoke in the dream bed, suffocated and hot. He pushed open the hinged side flap and slid his head and torso out, gasping for air. The room was bright and cold, the math resumed, and Marko saw his disappointment at leaving the borrowed body as a brown, flat oval in his chest. But it wasn’t being in an able body that he regretted the loss of so much as the in-between place of existing as pure essence. He looked at the dream bed tucked away under his mother’s bed and marveled. She’d done it. His mother had figured out a trick for slipping essence from form.
Marko heard the door open and his mom call his name. He quickly pulled himself out and dragged his body back toward his chair. Marko’s mom walked in as he was trying to climb back into it but finding he lacked the strength. Also, his back hurt more than usual. There was a particularly sharp pain directly in the center of his back on his spine, right around where he went from feeling to not feeling. What’s more, he felt the echo of the pain in his feet from the other body. Kali helped him, lifting him from under his arms up onto the seat.
“What are you doing in here?” she asked.
“I came in to look for you then just wanted to sit on the floor and meditate,” he said. He didn’t want to admit he had gone inside her dream bed and risk her not allowing him to do it again. He saw her journal replaced to its correct spot on her shelf and was grateful he’d thought to put it back before going into the dream bed. But his mom wasn’t buying it. Her forehead was creased into a skeptical expression.
“Something strange happened while I was meditating,” Marko said. He would give her a scent of the truth, just enough so that she would feel satisfied he was telling her everything. Her skeptical expression melted into curiosity. She said nothing. Her face was a question.
“I felt like I had no body and was just me without any weight or form.”
Kalina glanced toward her dream bed and Marko got nervous (two). Maybe he had just given it away.
“How did that feel?” she asked.
“Amazing.”
She smiled a sad smile and then rolled his wheelchair out of her room. Marko watched the carpet in front of him disappear beneath him and ached for that feeling to return.
7. December 21, 2015: Cambridge MA
She knew this shrink was a bad idea. Walking home from her second session, Kali felt the tides of guilt. Guilt now pervaded everything. The concrete she walked on, her ribcage, the glass-and-chrome tumbler she used for her decaf coffee takeaway, the coffee itself, hazy memories of Thailand and Bulgaria, the vein-like cracks in the pavement, the weather, the orbits of planets, the air, the rust-orange patches of skin on her mother’s elbows, the kisses. Especially the kisses. Zach became needy after Marko came home from the hospital, she remembered.
“Your mother’s always here taking care of my son,” he’d said, moping, hulking in the doorway to the bedroom.
“I’m grateful that she helps me with our son,” Kali had snapped. He slunk in and sat on the bed. Lowered his head into his hands.
“I need help, Kali.”
She didn’t say anything. She kept busying herself, folding all the clean laundry from the dryer then putting it away. After she was finished, she took up a cloth and dusted every surface in the bedroom.
“I need help,” he repeated.
“I can’t help you.”
He stood abruptly and crossed the room to her, grabbed her hips and turned her toward him. He kissed her so hard it was painful. His grip tightened and he forced his tongue into her mouth. She turned her face away and his tongue slipped wetly across her cheek. She twisted away. He glared at her.
“I can’t help you. I can’t have sex with you. I won’t do anything for you. I have nothing to give. Everything I have goes to this baby and there’s nothing left for you. Go somewhere else if you have to have attention.” Kali stated it calmly, as a matter of such solid fact that there was no room for appeal. His face registered its truth. He looked defeated. Tears filled his red, worn eyes. He turned and walked out before one of them could fall free. She wiped the wetness off her face and went back to dusting. Marko had been a baby then. He was sleeping in the next room; his oxygen machine whirred. His heart monitor beeped rhythmically, reporting a normal heart rate.
It went on that way for years.
“You’re my wife,” he’d said. “We have to have intimacy.”
“You want sex?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, let’s try it.” Kali realized that she didn’t have to desire sex to have it. She could simply do it. The idea was a revelation. And yet. Kissing him felt like guilt. Pressing naked against him felt like guilt. The act itself was guilt being stabbed deeper and deeper into her. It wasn’t right. She had to say no the next time. And the time after that. Again, she invited him to go somewhere else with his needs.
Then came the day when Kali walked into the bedroom to see Zach jump in his chair and close the browser window he had open. The implication was obvious: he wanted to get caught. She sat at the edge of the bed and stared at him. He looked tormented. He was too thin; his cheeks had hollowed and his eyes seemed sunken deep into his face with coffee-colored pockets beneath them. His handsomeness had been trampled under the weight of this baby. She knew then that he felt it, too—the sense that they were being punished. He only knew about the one abortion Kali had had with him. He didn’t know about the three others before that. He didn’t know how early on Kali became voluntarily sexual. Her genitals had been touched and licked and penetrated by many people. It started when she was only twelve or thirteen. Even before that, there had been the masturbating.
Now, for the first time in her life, sex was the furthest thing from her mind. She felt no desire for it and the memory of the desire for it bordered on disgusting. She’d kept her history a secret from Zach. She’d kept it a secret from everybody. The only person who knew was her mother, because Lydia paid attention. Lydia watched knowingly when Kali slunk into the house in the thin light of morning. She took Kali to get the first abortion. She was angry and wanted Kali to feel punished.
Later, when Kali looked at Lydia over Marko’s head as she held him or bathed him or moved him in and out of his chair, Kali could see that Lydia saw that Kali finally felt punished.
Thinking these thoughts, after her visit to the shrink, Kali walked into her apartment and went to Marko’s room and saw his hand lifted up in front of his face. She walked in and looked down at him. He trained his gray-blue eyes on her and smiled. Kali’s punishment was her reward.
8. December 15, 1984: Thailand
Todor was in love with his wife, Lydia, when he married her but he knew that she was not in love with him. She married him because he was wealthy, but he didn’t understand this, because she herself was a doctor. She would make enough money to live well with any man. Still, Todor didn’t question her. He was just satisfied that she accepted his proposal, regardless of her reasons. They bought a house in Sofia, Bulgaria. They had children right away, first a girl and then a boy. Kalina and Marko.
Lydia denied Todor sex most of the time after the children came. And even when she did give him sex, she was cold and dispassionate about it. It came to be that the only way he could bear it at all was to turn her face away from him and enter her from behind. At first, it was because her vacant eyes and stone face would kill the mood for him whenever he accidentally looked at her. But then, after doing it that way several times, it was because her body was strong and small like a boy’s, and Todor could pretend that she was a boy. It excited him very much, this fantasy. So when she started to deny him consistently, he grew lonely