The night my mother was placed in the sanatorium, a full moon hung against the blue velvet sky. It was mid-July in the last year of the decade. All day a dry heat had been burning the scorched grass on the lawn and I had felt anticipatory anxiety buzzing like a flickering lightbulb.
Ben and I were in our summer clothes: me, a white slip dress; him, a black muscle shirt. I had obviously been expecting this news. It had been a terribly long time coming, to finally hear of my vindication. Yet the relief was mingled with something darker that tasted like fear on my tongue, because I knew that the courage of my convictions would always overpower my hatred for her.
There was a specific fear that had buried itself within my bone marrow, recently. Though it made no rational sense, as I hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, I felt certain that the sanatorium’s warm, smiling nurses would be along to collect me next, to tie my hands behind my back with white rope the way they did to the agitated homeless, sometimes: white for dignity, for compassion.
The week before, flustered news reporters had struggled to contextualize, with no script for such a situation, why a group of twenty-somethings had self-immolated on the steps of America’s oldest standing observatory: four smiling fresh-faced young adults, three men and one woman, slowly pouring gasoline on their own heads, wrenching screams of profound agony as the conflagration enveloped the street corner.
The fire spread quickly, nature winning out, and everyone died in the fetal position like charred baby birds on the concrete. They were all pronounced dead at the scene except for the tallest youth, whose burns removed most of the skin on his face, raw and bloody thin strips of cured meat, and who died thirty-six hours later. In the end, I suspected, he had met the quiet death, the very thing he was pointedly trying to protest.
The irony clenched in my stomach as I read his manifesto, later. It was sophisticated and convincing. The last act of autonomy we had, he had argued, was the right to decide when and how to die. Anyone who wished to die, especially with the coming end of the world, could do so in whatever way they wanted—and the messier and more unclean, the better, because the state could not ignore blood running through their whitewashed streets.
Here in the Catskills, where the children ran about with dirt on their faces and there were more Montessori schools than public, we had yet to feel the impact and we lived what was essentially a normal, quiet rural life. But for a year or more, my mother had been certain of the end.
There had been too many eclipses, she said. Too many strange moons. The cycles had not lined up this way since the dawn of an empire several centuries before the messiah in his ragged clothes had wandered Jerusalem, fixed to a wooden cross until his heart exploded. On that horrid day, they had told me in my religion class, all of the planets had likely been in their fallen positions, too, and thus weeping along the world.
I wondered now if that were astronomically and mathematically possible. If we could ever know for certain. But it was true that the only time such a thing that occurred had taken place around the third century in the Common Era. It remained a mystery.
I had never bent towards conspiracies. Perhaps my mother’s obsession with them had inoculated me. The rhythms of nature were not, after all, conspiratorial in nature, although my studies had prepared me, of course, for the potential disruptions: unexpected not to God, but to the complacent people of the world, filling their mills with grist and planting doomed vineyards, certainly a shake-up in the order of things.
There was nothing unnatural about the earth’s occasional healing. I did not worry. I journaled in the quiet kitchen while Ben tilled the earth, all while knowing that my mother’s feverish prayers were growing more heated. At sundown in the vineyard, hair straggly, face dirty. Late at night in her bedroom, bent upon the hardwood on spindly knees.
It was no surprise to me that eventually the authorities would have to intervene. They had found her, I was told by my softly crying grandmother, wandering the streets in mismatched, wrinkled clothes.
She had approached a young couple and inquired as to their plans when the great and terrible conjunction in December came about, and the world began its slow decline. It’s been declining for a long time, she assured them, as you can see by all the hedonism, the drugs, the frivolity of the youth, the vainglory, the homosexuals.
From what I understand, having heard the story secondhand, this couple listened quietly for a while before calling the authorities, and it was at that point that my mother was placed in the sanatorium, where she was to be sedated by pharmaceuticals for the first time in her life. As a child I had to settle for tinctures even when I broke my ankle playing in the creek.
Now, the average doctor prescribed tinctures for everything: anxiety, depression, restless leg syndrome, sports injuries, a broken leg procured after a fall from a tall tree. The latter situation was how Ben had been first prescribed a sedative tincture, not knowing that opium was the primary component.
That was a few years ago, before they were advertising it plainly. Now he was useless without it, though functional enough that his family did not appear to recognize him as an addict. They certainly did not refer to him as such. Neither did I, usually, but I did not attempt to deny it.
I didn’t know, exactly, what they would do to my mother now. I knew about as much about the sanatorium as most citizens, which was next to nothing, but still more than Ben did, and despite my frustrated venting he refused to believe me when I expressed my concerns about the ease with which the lives of the unworthy were being claimed.
After all, he told me, how could anyone know with certainty that they were doing what I claimed, when the statistics did not prove any of it? No one could be so irresponsible: their contingency plans were in case of terrible, tragic emergency, something that would never manifest.
Yet his own family, for the past several months, had been speaking with increasing fervor about something that was of intense curiosity to everyone in the world: the impending conjunction of two planets right before the holidays.
Saturn, which restricted. Jupiter, which expanded. We had learned these archetypes by rote in elementary school. It was the same conjunction, they said, that had heralded the birth of Christ two thousand years prior. This much was empirically true; I had learned it in my religion class during my first year of college, before I’d dropped out. That was how conspiracies began: with a fragment of truth, like a shard of glass.
Ben’s family didn’t rant shrilly and hysterically like my mother and the pundits on the television, no, they were careful not to sound like lunatics, yet they were clearly quite confident that this meant the end of the age was coming, as predicted by the apostle Luke. The man bearing his jug of water, the beginning of the new age.
It was all upon us and we would ascend, if only we released ourselves from the corsets we called bodies. Flesh and blood and bone were so temporal, Ben’s mother had said once, mopping perspiration from her tanned forehead with a spotless white rag. I can’t wait to be all light and essence, she had said with a smile on her face, unconcerned with needing to eat food and no longer sweating in this damned heat.
They were ambivalent about the contingency plan. It was a smart thing the government was doing, Ben’s brother James stated to me once with an emphatic nod. It was kind, to provide a very calm and quiet exit when we all needed to. It was better not to suffer, they all said, even in front of their children, who nodded resolutely because they had accepted the truth of what the adults in their life spoke of so plainly.
I had allowed Ben ignorance for so long, because I loved him, but my patience was only so thin and I felt hopelessly lonely that night, fears swarming my head like so many moths and knowing I could not articulate them to Ben in a way that would make any sense to him.
Who had I married? Just a stupid man, my vicious and vindictive side argued. Just a stupid, salt-of-the-earth kind of man, hardworking and stubborn, always ready to serve and protect. The sort of man you could count on for practicalities, but one who had simply never imagined he would live through a time when he would have to become truly, deliberately principled.
Yet here was the end of my world as I knew it. My mother finally restrained and unable to hurt anyone, not even herself. I wondered if they were sedating her with laudanum and if she was refusing it like she used to when they first legalized it.
The night was coming on around me and I felt enveloped in it, desperate for its safety. The cicadas droned in the weeds. As the citronella candle burned down, I pulled my knees up under my chin, my thin arms wrapped around my tanned legs. I stared at the horizon until it blurred, the dark sky with its last trace of gold hovering above the evergreens at the edge of our property. The tops of the trees sometimes appeared to be on fire.
I watched the fireflies for a while, their lights blinking in and out like failing Christmas lights beneath the reedy growth Ben had yet to cut away at. Eventually, with a feeling of tremendous dread, I gathered myself and stood. Blue was snapping at mosquitos on the porch. The whiskey Ben and I had been drinking had gone sour in my stomach. A moment ago the solitude has been luxurious. Now I could hardly bear to feel so much with no eyes upon me but God’s.
I went inside. The living room light was off. I walked up the stairs in the darkness, following a small glow leading me to the bedroom. Ben had left the bedside lamp on, his glasses on the table all jumbled together with my spare jewelry and a few coins and the scrap piece of paper I had scribbled a note on.
Crossing the moon-drenched hardwood and turning off the small light, I joined Ben beneath the white sheets. I lay still for a long while, allowing him to sleep, feeling almost catatonic with grief.