by Chicago Anna
▶ Watch the author read the whole book · 6 minutes
To the Good Doctor van der Kolk
You are the greatest! I admire you greatly and am deeply grateful for The Body Keeps the Score.
Unlike yours, my book is a work of imagination, set in The Great New York Blackout of 2026, which hasn’t happened and may never happen. The elevator, the man with me in it, and the young girl are invented. The words of the man are not those of any real person.
The lights went out between the thirty-first and thirty-second floors. The elevator shuddered, sighed, and stopped, and the dark was so complete that I could not tell whether my eyes were open or shut.
“Well,” he said wryly. “That’s not ideal.”
I knew his voice before I knew his face. I had read him for years, underlined his words, argued with him in the margins. Now Dr. Not Quite Van Der was a breath away, and neither of us could see a thing.
He had stepped in at the lobby with his arms full of packages, wrapped in red and gold and tied with more ribbon than they needed. It was December, and I had heard him tell someone on the phone that his family was expecting him in the morning.
My legs, which have had their own opinions lately, folded, and I slid down to the floor. After a moment, I heard my companion slide down the wall across from me. We sat there, two people blinded not by a medical condition but by darkness. Nobody was leading anybody anywhere.
Then I heard it: there was a third person. Somewhere near the doors, someone was humming, so softly that at first I took it for the building settling. A young voice, a girl’s, I thought. The tune wandered off and came back, wandered off and came back, the way a tune does when it isn’t meant for anyone else. It took me a moment to place it: “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” She was holding herself together with it.
Neither of us spoke to her. For now, that seemed like the kind thing.
We slept.
The car had cooled all night. Anyone who has tended a building’s heat knows that kind of cold: fifty-five degrees, maybe less. Across from me, paper crackled as he pulled one of his packages closer. The girl’s humming had thinned to a thread.
The darkness did not lift immediately but it changed, softening the way the New Mexico desert softens before morning. I saw something that wasn’t there: the Eternal old woman among ivy-covered trees, holding an infant against her coat. A small boy in a hooded cloak stood beside her, watching. They were all safe—nobody even needed to speak. They were safe.
I accepted the apparition without fear.
As the vision faded, the light overhead flickered, buzzed, and filled the car.