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East Broadway station bleeds when it rains, water rushing down from cracks in the secret darkness of the ceiling. Someone should probably fix that, but it’s the end of the world, and New York has bigger problems than a soggy train station that no one should be inside of anyway.
No one takes the subway at the end of the world. No one except Cora and Delilah Zeng.
and the darkness clenches its teeth.
Apparently, people do strange things when they’re scared of dying, and one of them is hoarding toilet paper.
She feels certain about a lot of things she can’t explain, the way some people are certain that God exists. Some thoughts just cross her mind and sink their teeth in.
Delilah chooses the things she wants to believe, while Cora’s thoughts are bear traps snapping closed around her ankles.
Sometimes Cora thinks Delilah is more of a dream than a sister, a camera flash of pretty lights in every color that you can never look at directly. She wraps herself up in pale pink and wispy silk and flower hair clips; she wears different rings on each finger that all have a special meaning; she is Alice in Wonderland who has stumbled out of a rabbit hole and somehow arrived in New York from a world much more kind and lovely than this one.
She thinks a lot of other things about herself too, but she lets those thoughts go quickly, snaps her hands away from them like they’re a hot pan that will burn her skin.
But not everyone has dreams. Some people just are, the way that trees and rocks and rivers are just there without a reason, the rest of the world moving around them.
Cora thinks there are worse things than leaning a little bit into the crazy parts of you.
When you’re drowning and someone grabs your hand, you don’t ask them where they’re taking you.
It’s strange how hate and love can so quietly exist at the same time. They are moon phases, one silently growing until one day all that’s left is darkness.
It’s not something that Delilah says or does, really. Cora is used to her small annoyances. It’s that Delilah is a daydream and standing next to her makes Cora feel real.
The things Cora thinks she knows are too often just bad dreams bleeding into her waking hours.
Because even if Delilah tends to extinguish her own dreams too fast, Cora believes in them for all of their brief, brilliant lives. If Cora ever found a dream of her own, she would nurture it in soft soil, measure out each drop of water, each sunbeam, give it a chance to become. So Cora will not squash her sister’s dreams, not for anything.
Cora thinks about the Girl with a Pearl Earring, and the Mona Lisa, and all the beautiful women immortalized in oil paint, and wonders if they said cruel things too, if their words had mattered at all or just the roundness of their eyes and softness of their cheeks, if beautiful people are allowed to break your heart and get away with it.
She’s tried to metamorphosize herself into someone else—a box beneath her bed is stuffed with yarn from when she tried to be the kind of person who crochets, her bookshelf is mostly cookbooks from when she attempted to be the kind of person who likes cooking, and of course there was that night she watched intricate nail art videos until dawn. But everything sloughs off Cora like dead skin because she is not the kind of person who creates things, who makes a mark on the world. She is an echo, quieter and quieter until she’s nothing at all.
and Cora wonders at what point a person stops being one singular person and becomes a collection of parts.
An arm is not a person, so if Delilah is an arm underneath a train and a leg on a subway platform and a head lost in the crevices of the tracks, which part is the real Delilah?
Cora saw the man’s eyes as well, but the memory is blurred by the rush of the train car and everything that came after. She saw his eyes between his hat and his surgical mask, but she can’t remember them, and no one ever caught him. He could be the doorman at her apartment building, or a taxi driver, or her dentist, or even the fucking mayor, and she would never know.
But every life she can imagine building for herself just feels like throwing a tarp over a crime scene.
Cora will be damned if she makes a mess when she dies.
The shower is an act of unmaking, both the most wonderful and terrible hour of Cora’s day.
Cora has always moved through the world like a child in a fine art museum, afraid to touch.
A secret part of Cora likes the end of the world because it makes her strangeness feel quieter.
There isn’t one specific reason for the fear. Delilah said it was because Cora got pneumonia in third grade and had to go to the hospital and something about repressed trauma, but the thought of pneumonia does not scare Cora. Even COVID-19 does not particularly scare Cora. It is the dirtiness itself, not what comes after it.
She’s used to something always burrowing in her ear, prickling at her skin.
Delilah always said Cora was the good kind of crazy, the kind that didn’t hurt anyone, that did good things but just too much of them. But now Cora has forgotten something, has gaps in her memory, empty holes in the grout of her brain where something used to be, and that doesn’t feel like the good kind of crazy anymore.
It’s so unfair. Cora is doing all the right things. She has a new job. She speaks to her coworkers. She tries new hobbies. She is doing all the things normal people do. Yet she still feels like a puppeteer dragging her wooden body through the motions, and maybe she always will.
The official reason for Cora’s visit today is the first day of Zhongyuan Jie, the hungry ghost festival. Auntie Zeng says it’s when all the ghosts take a vacation from hell to visit earth for a month. The living are supposed to feed them and pray for them and make them offerings of things ghosts almost certainly don’t need anymore, like clothes and jewelry. But that’s only what Cora has seen from Auntie Zeng. Everything Cora knows about China has been filtered through her, so sometimes she’s not sure if something is true or if it’s just the way her aunt is. Cora imagines if she herself were
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“Ghost chair,” Auntie Zeng says. “For your uncle.” “You hated my uncle,” Cora says, but she switches seats all the same. “That’s why I feed his ghost,” Auntie Zeng says. “I had enough of him in one life. I don’t need him haunting me in the afterlife.”
Maybe she wants someone to teach her how to be a human the correct way, the way she never learned. Someone to wake her up and tell her what to eat, what to dream about, what to cry about, who to pray to. Because Cora somehow feels that every choice she’s made has been wrong, that every choice she will ever make will lead her deeper and deeper into a life that feels like a dark, airless box, and when she peers through the slats in the wood she’ll see the pale light of who she might have been, so bright that it blinds her.
But you can’t teach someone how to be a person. Cora was never real, she was only an echo of Delilah, and with her gone, she is no one at all.
All are welcome in God’s house, Auntie Lois says, but she always emphasizes the all, as if God is especially generous for letting someone like Cora in, like there’s something about her that’s inherently unholy.
and Cora had stared at the sunlight through the stained glass until her vision went blurry, had contemplated the sharpness of each cut piece, how easily they could split skin, how she could slice the whole congregation into hunks of meat just like Delilah and see how easy it would be for them to forgive her then, and why did everyone want to talk about it, to tell her what happened and what it means and what should come next, when Cora was the only one who was there.
Cora has tried to forgive him because Auntie Lois says it will make her feel better, but Cora doesn’t even know where to begin. She tries to imagine him, because you can’t forgive someone who doesn’t exist, but he bursts into a thousand white spiders in her mind, crawls into her mouth and ears. She thinks of only his hand and tries to forgive a single finger, even a fingernail on his body. She calls for feelings of love and grace like hauling an anchor to the surface of her mind, but it is far too heavy. All Cora can feel is that first hot splash of blood, the sharpness of it, the way it
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Bless me, Father, for I have sinned is what you’re supposed to say. Cora once asked Auntie Lois what to say if she hadn’t sinned, but her aunt only shook her head and said, You have.
Cora asked once why fear is a sin. Auntie Lois said that it shows distrust in God, that one should not fear men and only fear God. But Auntie Lois lives in Staten Island, on a quiet street where cops have nothing to do but stop teens from making out in cars. She may think she’s met fear, when walking alone in a parking lot at night, or when a car swerves too close to her on the highway. But Cora knows that the face of fear is not an abstract what-if.
Fear is born in the after, when the world peels back its skin and shows you its raw, pulsing innards, when it forces you to remember its name. Anyone who has seen the face of fear knows you should damn well be afraid.
Yuxi He’s single dead eye stares up at her as if saying, Of course nothing adds up, your mind is a labyrinth and you are lost inside.
More people use guns. Guns are easy and impersonal, a quiet click from across a room, and you can explode someone’s brains without even touching them. In a way, Cora doesn’t think that should be allowed. If you want someone dead, you should have to sink your fingers into their eyes, feel their trachea collapse under your hands, let them scratch your arms and pull your hair and cry and beg. Because if you kill someone, you should want it more than anything you’ve ever wanted before. It shouldn’t be easy.
Cora goes still because sometimes her desperation leaks out through her words. Cora wants Yifei to be the one who says it because Cora can’t trust her own sense of impending doom. If someone else says it, it becomes real.
Cora doesn’t like thinking of all the parts that make her up, all the glands and sacks and tendons and flaps. She wants to exist like a Lego person, with one singular body that exists in and of itself, solid, no room for anything inside.
She’s never grasped how doctors choose a specialty, how they want to understand one body part so intimately that they spend a decade studying it. How can anyone want anything that badly?
She knows that memories are not like turning pages in a photo album until you find the right one—every time you recall something, your brain rebuilds it from scratch, and every time it’s just a little bit different. It has to be, because brains are not video cameras; they don’t have that much empty space for unnecessary details. Someday, Cora will remember the hands and they will be completely divorced from reality, the hands of a stranger who never once touched her sister.
Most people don’t know how delicate the human body is, how easily things can pop and crush and break. Surely Dr. Robinson doesn’t know, because Cora is almost certain he’s never gouged someone’s eyeball out. But all it takes is a single moment to cross into the broken reality, the bad one.
His tone is kind, but Cora hears everything he’s not saying: The problem is not in your eyes. It’s in your brain. And Cora doesn’t want anyone digging around in her brain, not anymore. She already knows there are too many frayed wires up there, too many broken circuits. She knows that all organs are nothing but meat, and she knows a brain doctor isn’t any more shameful to see than an eye doctor, but she doesn’t think she can survive another medical professional telling her that her mind is a web they cannot untangle.
Whenever anyone gets a glimpse of what Cora’s mind is truly like, they always have one hand hovering above the panic button, ready to send her away, make her someone else’s liability.
She counts the dots as they reappear in her vision, one by one, like stars coming out at night. They bother her a little less now that she knows she isn’t going blind. She already knew someone had poked holes in her brain, after all.
You should go to your PCP, Dr. Robinson said. Ask if they want to refer you to a neurologist. But Cora has already been to the place that they put you when you become a liability. Where they want your mouth loose and drooling from sedatives, release you when you’re quiet and learn the answers that they like, even when they know you’re lying but don’t care. Her world focuses in on the singular determination to never, ever, go there again.
