Jane Mendelsohn - Burning Down the House

IT BEGINS with a child. She lives far away from any city, high up in the mountains. She sits by a fire. Light turns in crazy pinwheels on her soft young cheeks. Wind blows and the moonlit clouds go wild, an armada of wayward ships. Her mother and her father are close by, talking quietly in a tone that could be ominous or soothing, depending on the words, which she cannot understand. Her father says something and her mother begins to cry. The girl pulls her legs up and rests her chin between her knees.

Her father comes over and sits next to her. I remember the day you were born, he says. I swore then that I would always take care of you. He wraps his arms around the girl and holds her tightly. Life is not very long, he tells her. I want you to have everything.

The recruiter had come by when the child was getting water. She was off by the river, with her laughing friends. He seemed to know the area, the family, the girl. He spoke their language and promised safety and good work. He wore a shining watch and carried a leather wallet and showed the couple a picture of a restaurant where the girl could get some work. He pulled the photo out from between a wad of bills. The man and the woman were not sure what a restaurant was, but they were too amazed by the recruiter and the bills and the gleaming diner in the photograph to ask him any questions other than when.

When is tomorrow.

At ten years old she is taken away. Never again will she see the swollen sun rise over the hillside behind the hut. The snowy ashes in the fire pit, the skinny dog. She is taken in a direction she has never been, a passenger across the landscape, a wisp of information traveling through the air. She moves up and over the mountain range, past reindeer, gnarled trees, through a fog tinged with a piney scent that she has known all her life and that she takes for granted as the smell of being alive. She follows the recruiter down and down and down. The trip takes days. At the bottom of the mountain the scent is gone. A car is waiting for them. They glide through the countryside as if on water. Later a city materializes beyond the window, silhouettes of buildings against a smoggy sky, a demented network of streets and screeching commerce through which she tumbles like a coin or a broken bit of code, looking for something to attach herself to, to make some meaning.

On Tverskaya Street the women are called Butterflies. The recruiter tells the girl not to talk to them, that she will be going somewhere much better, a special place. He keeps her in the back room of a liquor store, and he brings her salty sandwiches and candy.

Two days later she is on a boat. At the crowded port cranes rise up like gargantuan metal insects against the glowing sky. The water in the river sloshes green and oily. On Tverskaya Street she realized quickly that the recruiter did not have her interests at heart, even when he took her to buy some clothes, even when he fed her the candy and sandwiches. But it was hard to reconcile that understanding with the knowledge that her parents had sent her off with him for her own benefit. When he says goodbye to her briefly, offhandedly, on the ship in the liquid predawn light, she is not sorry to be rid of him, but when she sees her new handler with his dead eyes and his many piercings from his brows to his nose to his cheeks to his lips, she understands that the recruiter had treated her kindly. This new chaperone does not even speak her language. What he communicates is by gesture and force.

She learns on the crossing that she is not supposed to resist the men who come to her at night. She rises up like some demon from the dead when they try to touch her but although she is tenacious she is not big. She has a strong face, beautiful but not pretty. Her eyes are intelligent and curious and still innocent although less so with each day of the crossing. She tries to fight with her fists, her knees, her nails, her teeth. She becomes a better fighter but is still no match for the parade of men. There is a grunting regularity to their visits. When she is not lost in the mystical elsewhere in her mind that she conjures to escape the daily brutality of this new life, she will occasionally catch a glimpse of their fat hungry faces and feel that, although nature as she has known it is beautiful and pure, the world is ugly and mankind unapologetically vicious.

One night a visitor comes to her with a gun. He wants to enjoy her while pointing the gun to her head the entire time. Thrashing to escape the barrel against her skin she is shot twice: once in the arm and once not far from her heart. The man races out of the cabin with his shirt smeared with blood and his pants in his hand. She lies on a sheet drenched in red, and her thin frame shudders. She feels nothing but an eerie peace.

The chaperone screams at her and finds a doctor who will care for her without asking any questions. The doctor comes often and she looks forward to his visits. He makes sure she is given proper food. Over the course of three weeks, as the ship stops at ports along its way, she recovers steadily and the doctor is pleased with her progress. The chaperone arranges to meet the doctor on the deck of the ship in the early morning to pay him as promised for his services. But the chaperone does not intend to pay. The chaperone greets the doctor with a knife and the doctor sees the steep side of the boat slanting against the rising sun as he bobs in the water before he sinks.

Now the child is no longer a child. She has been turned inside out and has felt her childhood cascade from her like the liquid and seeds of a fruit pouring into the garbage, the pure beginning of life discarded, a useless muck. She is allowed to walk on the deck to assist in her recovery. The passengers eye her skeletal shape and see no meat. She breathes in the ocean air. She looks at the rolling gray. She thinks about jumping overboard but for the moment her physical weakness is her salvation: she is too exhausted to kill herself.

When they pull into the port of their final destination she is presented to a new handler, another entrepreneur in this chain of small businessmen. As soon as they are away from the crowd and unseen he hits her to make absolutely certain she knows that he controls her. You are my property, his fists say. She has nowhere, has never had anywhere, to go.

They drive through the monotonous streets of a new city. She is no longer fascinated by the teeming life or the variety of people. As night falls they cross a bridge strung with lights and each light seems to her like a captured star wishing to return to the sky. Within a week she is living in the back of a spa in a strip mall. Her boss is a woman with an enormous forehead and tiny eyes, a cap of black hair and a slicing voice. Men come to the salon, which in the window advertises STRESS REDUCTION. Sometimes the girls, for the girl is not alone, get driven in a van a few miles away to a large hotel. She moves through her days with a determination not to die that comes from where she has no idea. Maybe the bad music that is always playing. Maybe the computer in the bosss room. Maybe those sounds and machines give her the sense that there is another life, another frequency or signal that if only she could grasp it would pull her through a hole in time or space back to where the stars are not strangled by invisible strings and instead free to move continually, fluidly, up above. She sees girls covered with cuts and others beaten blue and another one hang herself with a pair of jeans.